Then it all curdled. The so-called Arab Spring empowered elected Islamists in some countries while plunging others into state failure and civil war. As if that weren’t dispiriting enough, Twitter, the same app that had rallied global solidarity for the movement, soon revealed something else: that the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab dissidents were rarely liberal or democratic; indeed, when it came to hating the West, the “seculars” often outdid the Islamists.

No one embodied this dark turn better than Alaa Abd El-Fattah, the Egyptian blogger whose recent arrival in Britain so “delighted” Keir Starmer and his government. The 44-year-old El-Fattah — who’d spent the better part of a decade in and out of prison in his home country over his violations of restrictive protest laws — was a leading activist in the Arab Spring. He’s also an inveterate hater of Jews, America, and white people, and has publicly entertained violent fantasies about all three groups.

Starmer’s government made it a “top priority” to obtain El-Fattah’s transfer to Britain. The cause célèbre was also pushed by the likes of Judi Dench, Brian Cox, and Joseph Fiennes. El-Fattah had further support, it seems, from a small army of Whitehall bureaucrats, who in 2021 managed to secure a UK passport for him (on the dubious grounds that his grandmother had given birth in Britain decades earlier).

The resulting fiasco is an unanswerable indictment of the entire human-rights apparatus and worldview. Which is to say, it’s an indictment of the world that gave birth to Starmer’s career.
But El-Fattah’s history should not have come as a surprise. In the fall of 2014, when I was working as a London-based editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, the European Parliament’s United Left-Nordic Green Left bloc nominated El-Fattah for the Sakharov Prize, named after the Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. I knew of El-Fattah by reputation, having researched the Arab dissident for an anthology I edited on the Arab Spring. El-Fattah for the Sakharov Prize? That was moral madness.

As I wrote in a Journal editorial urging reconsideration of the award, “Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story. ‘One should only debate human beings,’ he tweeted in 2009. ‘Zionists and other imperialists are not human beings.’ In late 2010 he tweeted: ‘Dear zionists please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all zionists including civilians’.”

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There was more, as the editorial noted: “‘My heroes have always killed colonialists’, Mr. Abdel Fattah tweeted in 2010, linking to a news article marking the death of Abu Daoud, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes. In 2012 he wrote: ‘Assassinating [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat isn’t something that should shame a man, but instead honor him.’”

The editorial, published in America’s largest newspaper by circulation, had the intended effect. El-Fattah’s name was withdrawn from the Sakharov list. “We get results,” one of my bosses noted in a triumphant internal email. I could scarcely imagine that, a little more than a decade later, the odious El-Fattah would be fêted by liberal elites once more, this time in Britain. And on an even grander scale that would include the right to call himself a “Briton”.

This, despite the man’s manifest hatred for his adopted land. He has repeatedly referred to the British as “dogs and monkeys”, for example, and urged Londoners to burn Downing Street. He has “joked” about taking over towns and “rap[ing] ur women” — just the sort of thing British social cohesion needs amid the backlash over migrant hotels and grooming gangs. And he’s called for killing all police, “hating white people”, and the “random shooting of white males”.

Much milder rhetoric than El-Fattah’s can get native-born Britons prosecuted and sometimes jailed by their government. That the same government would fight for El-Fattah, and even celebrate him, is intolerable. It renders the reality of two-tier treatment crystal clear.

It is now being briefed that the Prime Minister was unaware of El-Fattah’s tweets and regards them as “abhorrent”. Yet Starmer’s plea of ignorance does not exonerate him. After all, he pressed Tory governments on El-Fattah’s status while in opposition without apparently doing any digging into his background, not least the circumstances surrounding the withdrawal of the Sakharov nomination. But more than that, the El-Fattah affair is the logical terminus of the Prime Minister’s whole worldview: one in which empty proceduralism and rights talk substitute for moral and political judgment.

We live in a complex, multipolar world, much different from the bipolar Cold War order that gave rise to Helsinki Watch, Amnesty, and the whole model of human-rights politics that formed Starmer. In such a world, advocates either end up acting hypocritically (why champion Russian dissidents, but not those jailed by allied regimes like Saudi Arabia?). Or else they maintain consistency — free everyone, everywhere — and end up championing nasty figures like El-Fattah.

Amid the West’s internal agonies over immigration, assimilation, and social cohesion, moreover, bringing over the wrong sort of person can have explosive effects, as the Starmerites are no doubt learning to their chagrin. Their human-rights politics reflect the internal confidence and stability of the West in those late Cold War years. Things were so good “here” that we could afford to worry about poor souls trapped “over there”.

Movements like Brexit and Trumpism, however, showed that all was no longer happy and stable in the Western heartlands; that while elites had been busy pursuing the politics of human rights and liberal expansion abroad, millions had been left behind materially at home. What did a name like Jamal Khashoggi mean to a Rust Belt car worker pushed into wage, health, and retirement precarity by the “blessings” of free trade?

As the British public, if not the British government, could immediately identify, one of the aggravating features of the El-Fattah affair is the cheapness with which he acquired a British passport. Fawning Left-wing coverage is more likely to note that El-Fattah delivered human rights lectures in prison than that he obtained a passport only in December 2021, via his mother. Suddenly the “dogs and monkeys” were of use to him.

Most dangerously, the willy-nilly granting of a UK passport to a hater of the West debases the whole notion of British (and Western) belonging. It confirms the worst suspicions of those who insist that the legal processes of immigration and naturalization mean little to nothing when it comes to genuine loyalty to Britain and the West. If the Starmer government retains a scintilla of prudence, or even the most basic instinct for political self-preservation, it must revoke El-Fattah’s dubious passport and send him home. And if that results in further jail time for El-Fattah in Egypt’s brutish prison system, that should be his concern — not Starmer’s, and not the British people’s.

Last week, the Government was forced into a humiliating climb-down on its attempts to address the welfare bill. This week’s fight will be over the provision of support for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (or SEND) another political hot potato — pitting underfunded councils against desperate families trapped in a broken system. Everyone involved is a victim of Britain’s paradox of good intentions, as reforms meant to safeguard the rights of vulnerable children, instead have created an open-ended legal obligation to deliver bespoke support — whether money is available or not. The result is reactive, chaotic and wildly expensive, as desperate children are left in the lurch and thoughtful reform nowhere to be seen.

Once a niche element of educational provisions, SEND has grown into a budget-devouring juggernaut. In the past financial year, total funding for young people with complex needs reached £10.5 billion. This is an increase of nearly 60% in just five years. It’s an unsustainable trend, with councils from Hampshire to London soon set to go bust.

As with many policy missteps, the roots of today’s SEND crisis can be traced back to a well-intentioned piece of legislation. The Children and Families Act 2014 was sold as a landmark shift towards a more compassionate and family-centric approach to supporting those with special educational needs. It featured Education, Health and Care Plans — known as EHCPs — which would provide support from birth up to age 25. Eligibility criteria was also broadened, so that more children could qualify for assistance. Yet, most crucially, it also reinforced the legal rights of families to receive tailored support packages. In England, one-in-20 pupils now have a formal special needs plan, and almost a fifth receive a form of SEND support. As a result, all of these children are now legally entitled to a range of specialist support services.

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Yet this increase in numbers — which continues to rise — hasn’t been accompanied by the required funding: demand has outstripped budgets to such an extent that funding per EHCP has actually fallen by 35% in real terms. Inevitably, in an effort to ration scarce funds, councils have started to unlawfully or unreasonably deny support to families. There’s an irony here: the more rights families were theoretically given, the more adversarial the system actually became. At the same time, record numbers of families have started challenging councils over support packages they felt their child needed, and by 2023, local authorities lost 95% of SEND tribunal appeals in 2023. This clumsy attempt at cost-saving had the knock-on effect of forcing councils to spend an estimated half a billion pounds defending themselves in tribunal cases.

This created a farcical — and deeply harmful — cycle of rejection and defence for families forced to fight for their children’s basic rights. They’re routinely portrayed as adversaries of the system. But the routine of legal conflict has become a sad necessity for those trying to secure support, with a mechanism intended to assist the most vulnerable transformed into yet another barrier to overcome. According to a report by the LGA, in fact, these legal hurdles produce “long-term misery, stress and hardship” for both the children and their parents. Even worse, the lengthy legal proceedings have been known to cost close to £20,000 in some cases, a figure prohibitively expensive to many frantic parents.

Councils increasingly realize that a lack of money isn’t a suitable defense when challenged, and not just because they’ve spent half a billion pounds in doomed court cases over recent years. Through the 2014 Act, Parliament had created an absolute legal obligation to provide support — without any exceptions. As a result, and unlike other types of public spending, these services can’t be pruned or means-tested when funds are low. This is the crux of the SEND crisis, and it’s the same fundamental tension wreaking havoc through local public services more generally.

In the case of SEND, the 2014 Act had the effect of giving every qualifying child a blank check for support which couldn’t be refused. This provided fertile ground for opportunists keen to exploit the legal bind. For instance, the council’s statutory duty to provide free transportation to SEND children has spawned a £1.4 billion school taxi industry. Over the past five years alone, spending on home-to-school transport for disabled pupils has doubled, with many local authorities now allocating more funds to SEND transport than to road maintenance.

These eye-watering figures aren’t hard to understand. With councils having no alternative method of fulfilling its legal obligation, the price of a single taxi journey has soared. In areas where providers are scarce, firms are able to indulge in blatant price-gouging, charging significant premiums for their services. In Bristol, a single taxi journey for one student can cost the council $150. Mini-bus trips for multiple students have been known to exceed $1,700 per trip. This open-ended commitment has forced local authorities into the role of beggar, borrower, or defendant, a situation that inevitably hamstrings relations between citizens and the state.

Promises are continuously made at the government level. Yet when the time comes for delivery, they never materialize. This creates a natural distrust and resentment towards the powers-that-be. At best, this manifests itself in a disdain for local councils, with parents believing that they are solely to blame for ineffective services. At worst, this dynamic can even transform into a deep-seated belief that the social contract is irreversibly broken. Certainly, Whitehall will soon be unable to scapegoat regional government for its structural failures and fiscal irresponsibility. At that point, of course, cheery pre-election promises will be summarily dumped.

Yet if SEND is stomping social trust into the ground, it’s far from alone. Consider, for instance, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, another case of a legal obligation whose ramifications have been financially ruinous. The Act forced the Home Office to provide accommodation and basic support to any asylum applicants who would otherwise be homeless. That may have been manageable in previous years — but quickly became impossible after a surge of arrivals, particularly via Channel crossings. With local housing capacities exhausted, the Government has resorted to mass-booking hotels as a temporary stopgap. This has seen the Home Office’s asylum support budget ballooning from around $700 million in 2019 to $5.4 billion last year. Like with SEND, meanwhile, private contractors are able to reap vast profits from the state’s absolute legal duty to house asylum seekers.

Both these failures highlight another serious structural flaw in the way Britain works. There is a total imbalance between the central government — which is incentivized to announce sweeping legislation to impress the electorate — and the local councils forced to pick up the pieces. Unsurprisingly, this creates an environment ripe for buck-passing. Regional councils can complain about their increasing responsibilities and dwindling funds, even as Whitehall can accuse councils of mismanagement or inefficiency in delivery.

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Both sides have a point, but disasters like SEND are simply the inevitable consequence of years of policy layering without sufficient consolidation. That’s ultimately a legal problem. Within the British legal system, after all, a “rights revolution” has taken place. Inspired by instruments like the Human Rights Act, it increasingly means the public is legally entitled to public services. In the case of SEND reforms, these transformed the broad human right of education into a highly specific, iron-clad, and judicially enforceable obligation to each child with special needs.

In isolation, this shifting legal philosophy may have been manageable. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by a wave of austerity and marketization. Especially after 2010, the Government pursued fiscal belt-tightening and embraced private solutions to public problems, driven by the misguided belief that competition and decentralization would enhance implementation efficiency. The reality was an often-unmanageable fragmentation, making oversight difficult and reinforcing severe gaps in accountability. Britain soon became a nation that expanded rights while contracting its capacity to deliver them.

When it comes to SEND, certainly, there are signs that a little investment can go a long way — clear enough in the example of Sure Start, which drastically helped cut costs later. Yet any new funding must be focused on addressing issues at their root, rather than on the usual short-termism. Legal expenses are a prime example here. Rather than fighting families through the courts, councils might instead consider what services the vulnerable actually need. In practice, this is likely through the use of in-house providers, delivered at source, and without the pointless legal hoops.

Alas, the Government’s response to these challenges seems as reactive and piecemeal as ever, even as Labour MPs are using their newfound authority to strangle reform at birth. According to Helen Hayes, chair of the Commons education committee, reassuring parents that EHCPs remain intact is “the right thing to do”. In a sense, that’s unsurprising: no politician wants to remove the rights of vulnerable children, even if it’s a financial necessity. Yet that leaves MPs stuck in a trap of their own making, unwilling to fully fund the system but also unwilling to reform the laws that make the same system unmanageable. All the while, the cost of implementation will continue to rise, more local governments will collapse — and essential support for the most vulnerable children will only get worse. But as must surely be obvious by now, you can’t legislate with compassion if you implement with cruelty.

We yell things like “We have rights!” when we feel that somebody might be trying to take one of them away from us. But where does it say we have them in the first place? It’s not in the Bible, or any other religious source. Yes, yes, I know there is a Bill of Rights in America, and any country worth its salt can point towards a number of things that their own countrymen (and even their women, on occasion) should enjoy as members of that particular society. But is that an absolute truth — or is it just hot air?

I’m starting to think it’s as much the latter as it is the former: just ask the Taliban… or the Mennonites… or…

For without the right to die — to decide how, when and where — what else do we have? In the United States, we have the right to make a will, to be of “sound mind and body”, and to say how we want to divide up our earthly possessions. But in very few states is that sovereignty afforded us upon the hour of our death. Even if we’re awake and aware and able to coherently make that decision on our own, the law and the state and even modern medicine itself steps in and tells us, “Not so fast…”. And what we want, as the patient, is often swept aside in the drive to keep us alive for as long as possible, even if that means in pain and despair and even if it’s the absolute opposite of our own wishes and desires.

And that sucks.

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I wrote a play, How to Fight Loneliness, which is on at the Park Theatre in London, in which one of the characters, a roughneck, blue-collar American named Tate, is asked by a young couple for his help in ending the life of the wife, a cancer patient named Jodie. Tate has been tapped for this duty because it is whispered that he helped an ailing step-brother pass away when he was younger. And, in the present, Tate is open to doing the same for Jodie. Is this because he believes so fervently in “assisted suicide”?

Hardly.

Is it because he’s a man of great religious conviction and he’s sure this is what God would want if only He would make His will evident to his followers?

Absolutely not.

Tate is willing to support Jodie because they went to school together and she was nice to him and, most of all, because she’s asking him to do it since no one else in her life is willing or able to, including her husband and herself.

So Tate does it because he believes he’s helping her, not hurting her, and because he believes it is Jodie’s right to make that decision and no one else’s. Simple as that.

When my mother passed away not long ago, she begged me for my help in her final days, but I was only able to read to her and whisper kindnesses and hope for the best. In the end I signed the papers for her to go to a hospice and that was that. She passed away in due time and in relatively little pain by that point, but long after the time when she wanted all the agony and suffering to go away but no one listened to her: not the doctors nor the specialists nor the many nurses who bustled in and out of her room, asking her to “be quiet and stop shouting”.

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And there I stood, hoping and wishing and praying but not really doing anything at all. Did I make a fuss? Yes, some… but not enough.

So this woman who never wished ill on anybody in her lifetime was denied the right to die, to be relieved of her misery and to leave this Earth when she decided it was time — Socratic oaths be damned — which is what leads me to ask how many rights we really do have and what those rights might be.

Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t hate anybody. Talk if you want to and vote for whomever you care to. At least until somebody tells you otherwise or your government decides you really don’t or shouldn’t have those rights and then they’re changed. Is that Orwellian of me? Not really — and I had to name-drop somebody because this is an essay, after all, and it’s supposed to sound important and researched and all the shit that people do when they write these things.

But not this one, not this time. This is simply a question, straight from the gut: if we Earth-dwellers honestly have rights, why wouldn’t “the right to die” stand chief among them?

According to my country, I do have “the right to peaceful assembly” but that doesn’t seem to include putting up a tent or overstaying my welcome. And depending on how a university or the police or even the White House is feeling, that right can be revoked in a dizzyingly short period of time, along with my ass being kicked off campus and maybe even suspended.

Depending on where you live, you can believe that you have a right to love whom you want and to vote for whom you want — but one quick governmental overthrow and some junta will laugh in your face when you screech “free love!” and “free speech!” and all the rest of the 30 “rights” you have on that UDHR list (as they’re applying battery clamps to your nipples or nether regions). Thanks for the effort, United Nations, but a lot of the time that list of yours doesn’t actually mean a damn thing. And it’s great when human rights organizations like Amnesty International jump in when they can to help out — but sometimes there’s absolutely nothing they can do, and you know it and I know it and they know it. Sometimes the baddies win and there’s no justice for it and that’s just the way it is.

I know, I know, I’m preaching to the choir and these all seem like such obvious points, but obvious is what we sometimes overlook or forget about… until it’s too late. I don’t think we have 30 rights. I don’t think we have half that many and, on a bad day (or a bad presidency), we probably have far fewer. They slip away, they get brushed aside and, sometimes, they even get violently taken away. We have rights until somebody bigger or stronger or meaner says we don’t and then we hopefully rise up, we march or talk or scream or fight and sometimes we even win…

And sometimes we don’t.

And another “right” is gone… and another… and another… and pretty soon we’re right back where we were, 50 years ago, or maybe even 100 years ago. Don’t believe me? Just ask any woman you know.

The truth is you’re born and you die (and sometimes you don’t even live long enough to pay taxes), and everything in-between is simply happenstance and luck, good or bad, and to put the rest of it in the hands of “beliefs” and “rights” and what you are “owed” for simply being here with the rest of us is just plain foolishness.

Appreciate what you’ve got, hope you have it again tomorrow, and wish all of it on everybody else. You can’t do much more than, but if you do at least those few little things, then you are so much further ahead of most people in the crowd that it’s not even funny.

And when you really think about this, any of it, for even a second, it’s not really very funny at all.

Of course, you have the right to your own opinion about any of this…

Or do you?

The year is 2024, not 1994: if the ICC simply sticks to going after Africans on behalf of the West while Gaza is being flattened, most or all countries in Africa will simply pull out. The West, after all, is no longer the only game in town when it comes to international institutions, and the Brics organisation has gone from a mere acronym to a project dozens of countries are clamouring to join. Moral considerations on the parts of Karim Khan or others at the ICC are likely a factor as well, but the main dynamic is structural: if it continues to sit on its hands, the ICC as a bureaucracy will simply cease to exist.

The American political system has responded to this act of defiance with a collective howl of rage. Several senior members of Congress had already issued a letter, threatening all members of the ICC with severe sanctions. And afterwards they doubled down: family members of judges and workers became fair game, as senators proposed they be banned from the US.

There is, to put it bluntly, something truly suicidal in the American political class choosing this particular moment — the very worst imaginable — to try to prosecute a war against the ICC and international law in general. Its ammo stocks are almost depleted, it is facing a truly terrifying shortage of sailors, soldiers and marines, and it has a rickety, insufficient industrial base to keep even a 300-ship navy going. If the Americans once spoke softly and carried a big stick, today it’s more accurate to say they are yelling loudly while waving a twig around.

In and of themselves, these ICC prosecutions aren’t a particularly big danger to Israel, and certainly not to America. While many European nations would probably arrest Israeli officials with ICC warrants — Norway has already said it would — indictments against Americans are not forthcoming anytime soon, and arresting senior American figures would definitely be a step too far for a country like Norway or Belgium. But this ICC debacle is almost certain to inflame a much deeper, more intractable problem hidden inside the American body politic, one of which US politicians seem serenely unaware. Swiftly followed by riots, civil strife and even revolution, it is one of the most dangerous problems a society can have. Its name is the failure of mimesis.

Human cultures — like human languages — propagate between generations through a process of imitation. The Greek word “mimesis” means precisely that — imitation — though it should be understood more like “re-representation”, rather than mere copying. A person who studies classical music under the great masters and then composes his own magnum opus is not copying a sheet of music; he has absorbed the craft and the essence of the art form, and that allows him to compose something new. A child who learns to speak English from his parents will not speak exactly the same as they did — language shifts even within the span of a human lifetime — but through the act of mimesis, he is still the carrier of a living language.

None of the above is hard to understand, but the kicker here is that what goes for language or classical music also goes for societal and political norms. For a society to actually maintain basic function over time, the younger generations have to be brought into its values and mores, internalising them and making them their own. In normal times, this happens more or less automatically; a medieval peasant generally doesn’t have to spare a lot of thought to the question of whether his children will inherit proper peasant values or not.

In certain cases, however, mimesis breaks down completely. To take one example, peasant cultural mores that had been stable in Russia for hundreds of years started to rapidly break down towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The reasons were fairly straightforward: if you are no longer a peasant, but an industrial worker crammed into crummy tenement room with 12 other people, working in a dirty, dangerous factory for 14 hours a day, what use are those peasant values and mores? At that point, the moral and cultural universe inhabited by peasants in the countryside is neither something you’re in a position to successfully imitate, nor would it even do you any good if you did.

In America today, mimesis is rapidly breaking down for reasons that are fairly similar. The US gerontocracy came of age at a time when the US was by far the most dominant military force in the world, and tiny countries like Yemen couldn’t possibly hope to go up against the US Navy. This was an era when a rising tide lifted all boats, when the US was a haven of free-market economics, where there were jobs and opportunities to be had around every corner, and when most of the world genuinely looked up to America as a shining city on the hill. Housing was affordable, jobs were good and plentiful, and college didn’t cost an arm and a leg.

This world is simply nothing like the one faced by someone in their early-20s today. The US economy is now sluggish and stagnant. The military is undermanned, under-equipped and demoralised. Housing is horrifyingly expensive, mortgages are all but unaffordable to the average member of Gen Z, and steadily growing homeless camps are a feature of most large American cities.

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What this all adds up to is a situation very similar to the one facing the Russian migrants forced into the cities at the turn of the century. Back then, there was no longer enough land to be a peasant farmer, and the new world of smokestacks and overcrowded tenement buildings was one that their parents and grandparents could offer approximately zero meaningful guidance for. The old culture broke apart, and what replaced it, initially at least, was… nothing. When mimesis fails, when cultural transmission from one generation to the next breaks apart due to neglect or environmental strain, it deteriorates into a vacuum. And that vacuum often ends up being filled with very strange and violent things.

Which brings us back to the ICC, and the true danger of America’s response to Khan’s behaviour. Without even knowing what they’re doing, US political elites seem intent on forcing the total, catastrophic failure of mimesis within American society. They’ve hollowed out their own economy and exported most of their industries to China. They’ve presided over an economic transition that makes things such as “family values” a joke: what use are those when you can’t even afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment? Finally, they are now smashing up the political underpinnings that their own society rests on: if you teach all these kids that we in the West may have our faults, but we are on the side of human rights, it’s a very bad idea to declare war on the system of international law.

The issue here isn’t hypocrisy, it is the creation of a vacuum: kids who have been trying to imitate a culture supposedly based on respect for human rights and international law are simply going to stop bothering to do so if it becomes too obvious they’re being played for suckers. In area after area, politicians in the West are tearing up the floorboards inside the very building they live in and shoving it all into the fireplace, replacing those old norms and values with absolutely nothing.

Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and the other senators now baying for blood in the hunt on the ICC aren’t actually going to bother coming up with a new story, a new set of norms or values for younger Americans to try to imitate. They simply intend to smash the old, replace it with nothing, and then marvel as this produces what it has always produced: discord, violence and, ultimately, political rebellion.

Any number of religions have passed through this cycle of birth, growth, decay, reformation and renewal. The latest is a religion born 75 years ago this week — the religion of human rights.

Sadly, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the manifest failures of the human rights framework as we know it today, and its grotesque contributions to the evil it is meant to fight, are not a bug of the system, but a feature. For decades in the Middle East, the UN’s countless Declarations, Covenants, Reports, Commissions and disproportionate denunciations of Israel did nothing to stem the chain of conflicts, cruelties and injustices that led to the horrific massacres of October 7, the subsequent flattening of much of Gaza, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced and innocent hostages buried alive in tunnels. Indescribable butcheries and tortures, and even documented gang rapes, were met by UN bodies, human rights NGOs and women’s organisations with thunderous silence. It took nearly two months for UN Women to even acknowledge these horrors at all.

Elsewhere, responses were more insidious. On 18 October, Human Rights Watch announced that it had verified “three incidents of deliberate killings” taking place during “the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas-led gunmen”. Three. In a statement issued on 8 November, it called on the US, UK, Canada and Germany to suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel, detailing what it described as “widespread, serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians”, with scarce mention of Hamas, other than one line calling on “Iran and other governments” to stop arming them. A week later, any lingering benefit of the doubt vanished after an outgoing senior editor there explained that this bloodless response to the bloodiest day for Jews since 1945 “did not happen in a vacuum”. Rather, “Human Rights Watch’s initial response was the fruition of years of politicisation of its Israel-Palestine work that has frequently violated basic editorial standards related to rigour, balance, and collegiality.”

In fairness, Human Rights Watch’s passing mention of Iran, though the kind of perfunctory ritual that gives insincerity a bad name, was still better than most anything coming from Amnesty International. But, then, Iran has long assumed a peculiar role in the world of human rights. Just last month, Hamas’s most prominent sponsor, a regime that openly imprisons and tortures dissenters, was allowed to chair a meeting of the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Yet few eyebrows were raised: over the decades, we have learned to shrug off such quirks with cockeyed optimism, convincing ourselves that they don’t really matter. But they do. And even by the comically degraded standards of UN human rights bodies, this was breathtaking.

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More to the point, the Iranian regime is able to participate in the world of human rights institutions precisely because, like the Soviet Union before it, it does not believe in them at all. Not that the Iranians, Hamas and other Jihadists don’t have principles. They certainly do, and we discount them at our peril. In the moral universe of Jihadism, the well-being of individuals, and certainly of infidels, dissolves into nothingness in the face of the divine; and the violence of October 7 was its own kind of worship. Oscar Wilde’s quip that “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue” turns out to have been tragically optimistic. When it comes to human rights, hypocrisy is the Devil’s method of rotting goodness from within.

How did we end up here? The concept of human rights feels both extremely old and extremely new. It echoes messages of justice, ethics and respect for human personhood known throughout history, and yet it also propounds a notion of universal rights not enunciated until the end of the Second World War. The year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, was also the year of the Genocide Convention, the desegregation of the US Armed Forces, the creation of the State of Israel, and the Berlin Airlift. It saw the birth of the American-led international order that would define our lives in terms of human rights, free trade, aspirations to racial justice, and the creation of nation-states for oppressed minorities. It was that year, more than 1945, which in many ways gave birth to the world order that is now collapsing before our eyes. But the idea of human rights was also built on the past.

Notions of the sacredness of human personhood and the unique claims of human dignity have been with us for millennia. Our modern understanding of human rights, though, first emerged from ideas of “natural rights” that had fuelled Europe’s and America’s political revolutions in the 18th century. Those revolutionaries, as well as the Abolitionists and Humanitarians of the 19th century, synthesised rich religious legacies of moral reflection and the sacredness of human life with modern concerns for individual well-being and nations’ aspirations for self-determination. During the heat of the Dreyfus Affair, Émile Durkheim wrote that this concern for individual well-being was a new kind of religion, a new moral order around which society would hopefully convene.

A number of the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration were committed to the religious traditions on which they drew, East and West, translating their ideas into the depersonalised, secular idioms of international law. It was hoped that unmooring these ideas from their theistic foundations would make them universally relevant to the making of a better world. Later, however, amid the pressures of the Cold War, the impulses of the human rights creators diverged. Some favoured strengthening decent government and rule of law at the levels of individual states, while others leaned towards creating transnational versions of individual states’ legal systems, along with the vast panoply of councils, committees, rapporteurs and subcommittees made necessary by the absence of decent government and rule of law in so many UN members states.

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It was not until the Seventies, once the failures of Soviet and Chinese communism and the disappointments of decolonisation were beyond dispute, that human rights returned to the stage in what Samuel Moyn calls “the last utopia”. Alongside this rose a vast network of human rights advocacy, forced to tack between the genuinely noble idea of transnational standards of justice with the inevitable necessity of choosing sides. Though they advocated a kind of anti-politics, they inevitably ended up as political actors in the global arena.

As always, the great sticking point was the Jews. As James Loeffler has brilliantly shown, the same Jewish jurists were deeply involved in the Universal Declaration and in Zionism, seeing in both an answer to the disastrously failed minority rights treaty system of the League of Nations.

But the roles of Jewishness and antisemitism in the larger story of human rights go even deeper. For millennia, Jewish existence has been a puzzlement to others, and regularly to ourselves. From Biblical times to today, the Jewish people have proclaimed a universal God with ethical demands on the basis of a particular covenant with Him and one another. In other words, Jewish existence always puts into question the relations between the national and the universal, the powerful and the powerless, the religious and the secular. We never fit into standard categories. There have been moments when this Jewish synthesis has risen magnificently onto the world stage, such as the Soviet Jewry Movement, lasting from the Sixties to the Eighties, in which universal rights, national identities and the larger causes of democracy and freedom all came together. But those times are exceptions.

The theological-political tensions of human rights — between the sacredness of individuals and the just claims of collectives — are well illustrated by the path of Amnesty International’s founder, Peter Benenson. A British Jew who worked hard to help Holocaust refugees, he eventually converted to Catholicism. Crucially, the Catholic doctrines he espoused were not the Thomist natural law teachings that played a large role in the post-war formulations of human rights, by which personhood, if ultimately beyond the state, is nonetheless enmeshed in webs of obligation and social order, which makes democratic states qualitatively different from others. Instead, they were rooted in the Augustinian teachings of the irremediable sinfulness of this world, and the lonely purity of the individual, no matter the state or social order against whom they rise, be it democracy or dictatorship.

These seeming abstractions had powerful real-world effects. For Benenson and Amnesty International, the violation of any one individual’s human rights is unacceptable, no matter the larger political and social system in which that person lives, be it democracy or dictatorship. That is a noble judgment, and a beautiful one. It is also, sadly, an invitation to the mindless legalism that can lead to Iran chairing a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council.

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The Soviet Union, for its part, freely signed any number of human rights documents because it had no intention of keeping them, and Leninist ideology said it didn’t have to. That not just dissidents, but the United States itself, would hold them to those obligations as they did in the late Seventies came as a bitter surprise.

With Western victory in the Cold War, human rights seemed poised finally to become a universal dispensation and a culmination of the best impulses of history. But this turned out to be a deeply destructive delusion. Today, the religion of human rights is as badly in need of reformation as was the priestly religion of ancient Israel, the Catholic Church in the time of Martin Luther, and, yes, Islamic thought after the frenzies of Jihadism will finally, hopefully, have exhausted themselves.

A reformation need not spell the end of human rights, but their re-birth. Human rights embody the precious notion, wrested from centuries of awful suffering, that there are certain things no state may be allowed to do ever, to anybody. Around the world, there are people standing up to dictatorships with unbelievable bravery and nothing legally to interpose between their governments and themselves but the human rights treaties and conventions that their governments have signed.

But a reformation is still necessary. Partly, this is a question of disaggregation. The term human rights has become linked to many noble and useful concepts: representative government, international humanitarian law, social and economic justice. These are all worlds away from the increasingly unhinged abstractions of human rights as preached in Geneva. And all connote a turning away from airy abstractions to face concrete realities on the ground — one small, usually compromised, step at a time.

The core idea of human rights — of ensuring respect for every single person’s fundamental dignity in processes of government and law, without exception — is not to be discarded. But we have to be brave enough to admit that the iterations of human rights as we know them have failed — and that if they are not drastically revised, conceptually and institutionally, they will do more harm than good. 

What began as a trickle in the early 2000s had, by 2011, become a flood, when, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, tens of thousands of migrants arrived on the island. Lampedusa very quickly came to represent a sort of inverse Ellis Island: the unwanted arriving in a country from which millions had once left. So much so that Pope Francis chose to visit it in 2013 to show solidarity with the arrivals. Ten years ago, a Libyan fishing boat carrying more than 500 people sank off its coast. Last month, more than 12,000 migrants, twice the island’s population, arrived by sea. The decade has felt, to Lampedusa’s inhabitants, like a new chapter in history.

But how different is this chapter? In France, Germany or Italy, footage, often from Lampedusa, plays in the news studios.  There is a pattern to what happens next. The host then introduces his guests. After casting them as the Right and the Left, the pundits will then be pitted against each other, to answer a simple question: what does this migration mean?

Their answers are often the same. For those on the Right, the migration flows are a historical break — in their scale, nature and intensity. They require “Fortress Europe”. For those on the Left, they are nothing of the sort, but part of a long history — both colonial or gastarbeiter. It is fundamentally more of the same, requiring, if not open, then flexible borders.

A historical lens is more rewarding. It was in the early Seventies that the British literary critic John Berger understood that Europe was being remade by immigrant labour. Together with Jean Mohr, he wrote A Seventh Man, a psychological portrait of a gastarbeiter in continental north-western Europe. The title itself reflects the importance that migrants already had in the European economy: even then, one in every seven manual labourers in Germany was born abroad.

The first striking difference is the process itself. Berger’s migrants were recruited by government agencies — Germans seeking Turks — with their transport organised from the fringes of Europe to its centre. Control not chaos. The European state was in the driving seat. That is not how it feels in Lampedusa: here, the migrants themselves have driven the migration. The work of countless individuals — the officials call them smugglers — who have built up the routes. The European state feels as confused and powerless as to Berger it seemed strong.

But it is the different nature of the migrants that is most striking. Berger’s reporting led him to build an everyman in 1975 that is more reminiscent of a rural-to-urban migrant in 1875 than a passenger through Lampedusa in 2023. His subjects are uneducated rural men — from the village, clueless about the city, without words, politics or a worldview that will help them navigate their destinations.

Reading A Seventh Man and comparing it with my own recent reporting, I was struck first by the huge continuity in the scale of the migrant economy. Already, according to the statistics in Berger’s dispatch, some 25% of industrial workers in France, Switzerland and Belgium were foreigners. But then I was hit by the psychological difference. Because the hundreds of migrants I interviewed were not village boys.

If I were to construct, as Berger did, an everyman, a Lampedusa Man, he would come from the lower middle class that has emerged in Africa and Asia. They almost always speak some English. They have WhatsApp, a Facebook account and a smartphone — though they might have traded it on the way. They were born in the city. They have grown up watching Friends and The Simpsons. And they certainly have a politics: both a keen sense of their country’s exploitation at the hands of the West, but also a longing for the freedom they believe only Western institutions can guarantee them. The same applies whether or not they are refugees.

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Unlike the men Berger and Bohr painstakingly photographed, there is no expectation, or even myth, of return. Those young men, in 1975, talked of feeling ripped from their natural environments — a premodern Turkish or Portuguese village. For the young man arriving on Lampedusa, it feels rather different. This 20-something Nigerian or Egyptian is as much a product of the internet as his European counterpart; entering the developed world is partially a homecoming.

Yet his destination is as changed by the internet as himself. The journey’s end of Berger’s everyman was the Fordist factory, and he liberally quotes Marx, Engels and the unvarnished words of Henry Ford himself to describe their conditions. The point Berger was making would have been obvious to his readers. The fundamental conditions of the industrial working class had not changed much since the late-19th century. They were still the proletariat, but of a different nationality.

This is not how our Lampedusa Man has come to experience Europe. Now, a few years on from his arrival in Paris or Berlin, he is to be found cycling for Deliveroo or delivering for Amazon. He has no foreman; there are no line workers; there is no weekly dance. He is alone, inhabiting a technological structure he cannot see and does not understand.

Berger spends much of his book castigating the trade unions for not extending solidarity to the gastarbeiters. This can only be read with a certain sadness today. The shoulder-to-shoulder life of the urban working class that Marx would have recognised — full of weak ties woven across the city and Christmas cards for the milkman — no longer exists. For Lampedusa Man, his experience of the city is provided by an app, which becomes more and more enraged as it hurries him to a door that eventually opens to no eye contact.

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Above all this hangs Europe’s shifting geopolitics. It is true that, 50 years ago, there were already 11 million migrants in north-western Europe. It is also true that the migrant and his life have changed utterly. But the deeper change is about Europe’s position in the world.

When John Berger wrote A Seventh Man, he did so at the start of a revolution in public and political concern for human rights. This was part of a bigger trend, as the struggle for human rights around the world replaced class or national struggle as the great cause of a Western Left-liberals.

The same decade would see the breakthrough of Amnesty International, the organisation’s membership leaping from 15,000 in 1969 to 200,000 by the end of the Seventies. It saw both the group and the Soviet dissident Andrey Sakharov awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The two were intertwined: as political incentives to push human rights in the Soviet Union grew, it dovetailed with a growing public campaign which ended up reinforcing Western geopolitics. It drove an increasing radicalism in call and response, between the public and politicians, which fuelled interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and, of course, Libya.

Ten years on, Lampedusa confirms that this historical era is over; that the prioritisation of human rights and the priorities of European politicians no longer align. The recent visit of European Commission chief Ursula Von Der Leyen with the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stands in stark contrast with that of Pope Francis a decade ago. Their visit was part of a wider flurry of Mediterranean diplomacy with Tunisia — a neat distillation of a new geopolitics which has turned democracy on its head to try and curb migration.

Visiting Tunisia, European leaders have dangled more than €1 billion to support the increasingly autocratic leader Kais Saied, who, facing immigration pressure himself, has embraced anti-black rhetoric about “hordes” and “the Great Replacement” — supposedly of Arabs by Africans. This is a sharp shift from 2011, when European leaders welcomed a revolution in Tunisia and joined a US-led intervention in Libya. Today they are buttressing authoritarians. Where they once welcomed European pressure on North African autocrats, human-rights NGOs now decry Europe’s partnership with a regime which has practised desert “push backs”.

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Even so, it seems likely EU governments will be forced to hand over more money, as their voters demand hard borders and Africa’s population soars. It is easy, for instance, to imagine Meloni and Le Pen’s recent call for “a naval blockade” being succeeded by a demand for boots on the ground to enforce what North African border guards have promised.

But this is not the only way the pressure to disconnect human rights from foreign policy will grow. When it comes to China, in order to compete for influence, Western governments led by the US are also downgrading human rights. Consider Equatorial Guinea, led by the notorious Obiang kleptocracy, where, in order to prevent the installation of a Chinese Naval base, the Biden administration was forced to send a senior National Security Council aide to deliver gifts for its leaders, including a silver platter, with the US national deal. The same pattern can be seen from India and Turkey to the Philippines.

Meanwhile, decarbonisation, the geopolitical implications of which have yet to be fully understood, entails a whole new set of relationships in which Europe will be compelled to talk less about human rights. Essentially, pursuing Net Zero requires a global mining revolution for critical raw materials such as lithium and cobalt — and Europe, it appears, is poorly endowed in these. To ensure regular supplies, it will be forced to downgrade human rights while forming a whole set of new ties with emerging mining states from Indonesia to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There is, therefore, nothing inevitable about the centring of human rights in Europe. They didn’t precede our current era, nor will they succeed it. Perhaps, as we think of the rocky coves of Lampedusa, and the growing indifference to the thousands that land there, or who die trying, it is not a question of whether we will fail to see them in the future. Lampedusa is telling us we are already close to blind.

Of course, when she became Prime Minister three months later, she attempted no such thing, perhaps reasoning that leaving the EU was quite enough work for the moment. Still, the question has not gone away. The Government says that it remains committed to UK membership of the ECHR, but, as the Channel crisis continues, its commitment seems to be waning.

Earlier in the year, Rishi Sunak, was reported to be considering contesting the next election on a commitment to withdrawing from the ECHR if the European Court of Human Rights were to find his new immigration legislation incompatible with the Convention. Only this week, Robert Jenrick, the Minister for Immigration, said that the Government would do “whatever is necessary” to stop “the small boats”, clearly implying that this included withdrawal from the ECHR.

The Supreme Court will soon hear the Government’s appeal in the Rwanda litigation, and the Government may well prevail. The Court of Appeal’s recent judgment, which held that removing asylum-seekers from the UK to Rwanda would breach Article 3 of the ECHR, is open to serious question, and the Supreme Court under Lord Reed’s leadership is a much more legally disciplined institution than when he took over from Lady Hale in January 2020.

If the Government’s appeal succeeds, the litigants will proceed to the Strasbourg Court, which may eventually find against the UK. But more immediately, well in advance of any final judgment, an anonymous judge of the Court may indicate “interim measures” under Rule 39 of “The Rules of Court”, which would instruct the UK not to carry out removals until some later date.

The Strasbourg Court’s Rule 39 practice is incompatible with the text and structure of the ECHR and should be firmly rejected: the Convention confers binding force on final rulings of the Court, but not on “interim measures”. Section 55 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 seems to recognise this, providing ministers with the power to decide whether or not to remove a person from the UK despite an “interim measure”. This is an oddly framed power, and it is a miracle that it was ever enacted. Between government lawyers and the law officers, it is very difficult for the Government even to put before Parliament legislation that the Strasbourg Court might in the end disapprove.

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This points to a wider problem with ECHR membership. The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty provides that whatever the King-in-Parliament enacts is law. Legislative freedom is the centrepiece of the Westminster model and it is for Parliament, in conversation with the people, to decide freely what the law should be. However, membership of the ECHR and subjection to the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court means that Parliament’s freedom to legislate is exercised under a cloud: deliberation within Parliament is often distorted by reasoning not about the merits of proposed legislation but about its compatibility with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The problem has been vividly apparent in relation to the Government’s various attempts to address lawfare against UK armed forces.

Strictly, Parliament is free to enact whatever legislation it sees fit, even if this is incompatible with the UK’s international treaty obligations: it is crystal clear that legislation which is incompatible with a treaty remains valid law, which everyone, including civil servants, is obliged to obey. Still, there are very good reasons for the Government to be slow to propose, and for Parliament to be reluctant to enact, legislation that would place the UK in breach of its international obligations. The UK’s reputation matters: so too does international order.

The problem with the ECHR, then, is not that it is an international treaty. The problem is that the Court has made it into a dynamic treaty. Rather than simply upholding the terms agreed by the member states, the Strasbourg Court has, since the Seventies, said that the ECHR is a “living instrument”, the meaning of which changes as the Court decides a succession of cases and divines a changing European consensus.

Deploying this approach, the Court has remade the Convention, imposing far-reaching new obligations on states and driving its own vision for social, moral and political reform across Europe. Most strikingly, the Strasbourg Court has invented a whole new European law of immigration and asylum which has no foundation in the text. But the Court’s case law distorts legislative deliberation and government policy-making across the field, including in relation to welfare policy, social policy, penal policy, counter-terrorism, military action, housing, taxation and press freedom.

There is, as a result, a vast gap between the express terms of the ECHR and the case law that the Strasbourg Court now applies. Enthusiasts for the status quo routinely overlook this.

In a nicely executed piece of Guardian agitprop in 2016, responding to Theresa May’s call to leave the ECHR, Patrick Stewart features as a new Prime Minister railing against Europe’s assault on British sovereignty. At one point, he asks his cabinet: “What has the ECHR ever done for us in return?” Nothing, reply his ministers, apart from providing the right to fair trial, the right to privacy, freedom from torture, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery and so on.

The response is absurd because the protection of rights and freedoms in the UK long predates the ECHR — we do not owe fair trials or the abolition of slavery to the Strasbourg Court. The sketch itself recognises this when it goes on to say that the British drafted the Convention to help Europe sort itself out.

In any case, the problem is not with the terms of the ECHR, but with the Strasbourg Court’s departure from them. This is revealed by what the sketch’s writers left out. At one point, Stewart mocks David Cameron’s remark about feeling “physically ill” at the thought of introducing votes for prisoners. But the sketch does not include prisoner voting in its litany of “what the ECHR has done for us”. Nor does it mention that the Strasbourg Court invented a right to prisoner voting, a right which the member states did not intend to create.

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The UK Parliament, in response, refused to change the law to comply with the Strasbourg Court’s 2005 ruling. Yet 12 years later, the Committee of Ministers, which monitors compliance with judgments of the Strasbourg Court, gave the UK a clean bill of health — a fudge designed to obscure the fact that the UK had not changed its legislation as the Court demanded.

Principled defiance of the Strasbourg Court is therefore an option. With Parliament’s support, the Government could refuse to comply with judgments that brazenly misinterpret the text of the ECHR and thus depart from the terms that the UK, like other member states, agreed. The Supreme Court made the case for such defiance in 2015, in a judgment about the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU, which is also inclined to exceed its jurisdiction. Still, it is much easier for Parliament to refuse to amend or repeal legislation that the Strasbourg Court has denounced than for the Government to propose new legislation that it fears the Court will denounce.

Whether in relation to the Channel crisis or more generally, the Government should not use membership of the ECHR as an excuse for failing to propose legislation that in its view is necessary and justified. Rather, it should recognise that leaving the ECHR would restore Parliament’s freedom, on behalf of the British people, to decide what our laws should be. Crucially, this is not a party-political matter, even if it looks set to become one. Bringing the Strasbourg Court’s jurisdiction over the UK to an end would strengthen parliamentary democracy, regardless of which party forms a government and enjoys a majority.

This observation on the pretensions of humanity — cool, disillusioned, unsparing of sentimentality — was made in the Forties, midway between our own time and the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin did not, in his foundational work on evolution, focus on Homo sapiens. Only with the publication, 12 years later, of The Descent of Man did he explicitly address the question of “whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing form”. Nevertheless, the implications of his theory, for humanity’s claim to a special status, had been evident enough from the start. Bishops might mock, and demand to know whether Darwin’s followers were descended from gorillas on the father’s side or the mother’s side, but humans ranked, in the final reckoning, as organisms just like any other. For them to imagine otherwise, to regard themselves as somehow superior to the rest of creation, was a conceit verging on the ludicrous.

Darwin was not, of course, the first to have undermined the notion that humans might stand at the centre of the universe. In 1638, the young John Milton, in Florence, “visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought”. It was not the sun that revolved around the Earth, so Galileo had taught, but the Earth that revolved around the sun. Time came to prove his hypothesis right.

Today, we know that the sun is an undistinctive star in an undistinctive corner of an undistinctive galaxy in a universe so stupefyingly vast that it can hurt the brain even to try and comprehend its size. Set against the icy immensities of space, what is humanity, then, but the merest speck of a speck of dust? What scope is left us as a species to claim any dignity at all? “In science,” as the astronomer Seth Shostak has put it, “if you think you’re special, you probably aren’t.”

Strikingly, however, in an age that has seen the theory of evolution almost universally accepted in Britain, and the limits of our knowledge of the universe pushed to ever more incredible extremes, there seems to have been no diminution in the value that we, as a culture, ascribe to human life. Quite the contrary. That we are all of us possessed of certain fundamental rights, simply by virtue of being human, and of a dignity that embraces our entire species, are doctrines so widely accepted in contemporary Britain that many of us barely recognise them as doctrines at all. It is a measure of just how radically these beliefs privilege human beings that they have increasingly come to be described, over the course of the past century, as “humanist”.

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The term is a vague one; and the fuzziness of the definition has encouraged various attempts to endow it with a greater precision. In 2002, the World Humanist Congress, meeting in the Netherlands, issued what its delegates presented as “the official defining statement of World Humanism”. The Amsterdam Declaration proclaimed, “the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others”. Religions — dismissed as “dogmatic” — were condemned for their ambition “to impose their world-view on all of humanity”. Science and its methods, by contrast, were highly praised. Not for humanists any Bronze Age mumbo-jumbo. Ethics were to be derived, not from sky fairies, but “through a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision”.

To accept the truth of all these various propositions — one might almost call them dogmas — requires, of course, less the exercise of reason than a leap of faith. That science sustains a belief in human rights is hardly an obvious proposition. Implausible too is the conviction of those who issued the Amsterdam Declaration that their own values are where “a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision” is bound to lead — so much so that they rank, in effect, as universal. International the Humanists may claim to be, but in truth they are preponderantly Western. The delegates who met in Amsterdam for the first World Humanist Congress came from the Netherlands, the United States, Britain and Austria; only one of the 18 subsequent congresses have been held outside Europe, North America or Australasia; the headquarters of Humanists International is in London. Its understanding of “universal” is, then, a somewhat culturally contingent one.

Humanists, unsurprisingly, tend to reject this characterisation. They prefer to see themselves as the heirs of traditions of intellectual enquiry that embrace the globe, and reach back millennia. In ancient India, in Confucian China, in classical Greece, writings have been identified by humanists that appear to prefigure the very things that they themselves believe. Yet the risk of this approach is not merely that it results in cherry-picking, but that it can obscure the very alien quality of those texts which are being cherry-picked.

Take, for instance, ancient Greece: a civilisation for which humanists have long had a particular fondness. Epicurus, for all that he featured in a list of famous atheists drawn up by the philosopher Sextus Empiricus, believed in gods. The only value of research into the natural world, so Epicurus believed, was to enable the philosopher, by properly appreciating the pointlessness of superstition, to attain the state of tranquillity that was, so he taught his disciples, the ultimate goal of life. The closest modern parallel is less Richard Dawkins than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

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To draw on a fittingly Darwinian analogy, ancient atheists and modern humanists resemble one another in the way pterosaurs resemble bats: as examples of similar features developing in unrelated species. That isolated prefigurings of humanist beliefs are to be found scattered in ancient texts does not in itself demonstrate an evolutionary relationship between them.

But how common, in antiquity, are the fundamental tenets of humanism: that humans — no matter their sex, their place of origin, their class — are all of equal value; and that those who walk in darkness must be brought into light? Not common at all, I would say. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that their fusion was pretty much a one-off.

There is no single text, perhaps, that is more consistently the object of humanist contempt than the book of Genesis. The creation of the cosmos in six days; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah’s flood: here are stories that have long served as prime exhibits in the contention that religion is merely a farrago of childish nonsense. This is why Genesis can pretty much be guaranteed not to feature in round-ups of the ancient texts that humanists are prepared to acknowledge as influences. Yet humanists, no less than Jews or Christians, are indelibly stamped by it. In fact, if there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species, it is the opening chapter of the Bible.

Gods in antiquity were not in the habit of endowing humanity with an inherent dignity. Quite the opposite. “I will make man, who shall inhabit the world, that the service of the gods may be established, and their shrines built.” So spoke Marduk, who according to the Babylonians created humanity out of a sticky compound of dust and blood to be the slaves of deities. Here was an understanding of man’s purpose, bleak and despairing, that it would have been very easy for the exiles brought to the banks of the Euphrates from sacked Jerusalem to accept: for it would certainly have corresponded to a sense of their puniness before the immensity of Babylon the Great.

But the exiles from Judah did not accept it. They clung instead to the conviction that it was their own god who had brought humanity into being, per Genesis. Man and woman, in the various stories told by the exiles, were endowed with a uniquely privileged status. They alone had been shaped in God’s image; they alone had been granted mastery over every living creature; they alone, after five days of divine labour, had been created on the godh day.

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The corollary of this was, of course, very clear: that the cult of Marduk ranked as the merest superstition. So too did the pantheons worshipped by other peoples: the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians. Male gods and female gods; warrior gods and craftsmen gods; storm gods and fertility gods: they were all of them, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “less than nothing”.

In the Middle Ages, no civilisation in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs as was the Latin West with Christianity. Elsewhere, whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions which served to define them; but in Europe there was only the odd community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Church. Just as humanists do today, it cast its values and ideals as universal — “catholic”. From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter, from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath, the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones.

Even when, in the 16th century, Christendom began to fragment, and new forms of Christianity to emerge, the conviction of Europeans that their faith was universal remained. It inspired them in their exploration of continents undreamed of by their forefathers, and in their attempts to convert the inhabitants they found there.

Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical re-alignment, our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as most of us in the West had assumed them to be. The need to recognise just how culturally contingent they are, and not to confuse them with “human nature” is, perhaps, more pressing than it has ever been. To live in a Western country is to live in a society that for centuries — and in many cases millennia — has been utterly transformed by Christian concepts and assumptions. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view.

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So it is, for instance, that the Amsterdam Declaration can airily dismiss the dogmas of religion, even as it simultaneously takes for granted the existence of “universal legal human rights”. Yet to believe in the existence of human rights requires no less of a leap of faith than does a belief in, say, angels, or the Trinity. The origins of the concept lie not in “the application of the methods of science” so prized by the Amsterdam Declaration but in medieval theology.

When, in the 12th century, Christian scholars sought to fashion a properly Christian legal system, they naturally turned to the Bible for guidance. There, they read that all men and women were endowed with an inherent dignity. All souls were equal in the eyes of God. Yet how, that being so, were Christians to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that “the use of all things should be common to all”? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in the Latin West.

The solution, arrived at by 1200, was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to those learned in the Church’s canons, iure naturali — “in accordance with natural law”. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. He was merely taking what was properly owed him.

Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers decreed, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered something novel: a legal obligation. That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, however, was a matching principal: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was — in a formulation increasingly deployed by lawyers in medieval Christendom — their ius: their “right”.

Yet this doctrine — despite its origins in Christian jurisprudence — was one that would come, in time, to slip the moorings of doctrinal Christianity. Indeed, first in the American Revolution, and then in the French, the claim would be made that human rights owned nothing at all to the distinctive history of Latin Christendom. They were instead eternal and universal. “The Declaration of Rights,” proclaimed anti-clerical French revolutionaries, “is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.” A momentous discovery had been made: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.

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The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, would prove itself brilliantly adept at exploiting this realisation. Repeatedly, Christian concepts were re-packaged for non-Christian audiences. Today, as in the 18th century, a doctrine such as that of human rights is far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe is kept scrupulously concealed. The emphasis placed by United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction.

Yet this in turn veiled a further irony: for what was the contempt displayed by the iconoclasts of the French Revolution for Christianity if not a sign of Christianity’s influence? “The old has gone, the new has come!” So Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, had proclaimed. Change, in the opinion of the Romans, was by definition sinister. The phrase res novae — “new things” — served as a synonym for everything in society that was most menacing. Christianity, on the other hand, glorified revolution. Just as Isaiah had condemned the gods of the Egyptians and the Babylonians as mere idols, fit to be toppled into the mire, so had Christians in the early Middle Ages equated progress with the banishment of superstition. Trees sacred to pagan gods were exultantly felled by missionaries, and churches planted where blood-stained altars had originally stood.

Humanists, when they celebrate the liberation from dogma and superstition that is to be gained, in their opinion, from “the application of the methods of science”, are bearing witness to the enduring hold on Western civilisation, not of Greek philosophy, but of Biblical prophecy. It was certainly no accident that many of Darwin’s most enthusiastic defenders should have borne the unmistakeable stamp of radical Protestantism. “Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies.” So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, an anatomist and biologist whose genius for savaging bishops led to him being described as “Darwin’s bulldog”.

That it was his duty to bring light to the world was Huxley’s devoutest conviction. His sense of himself as a member of an elect had — as contemporaries were quick to note — a familiar quality: “He has the moral earnestness, the volitional energy, the absolute confidence in his own convictions, the desire and determination to impress them upon all mankind, which are the essential marks of the Puritan character.” Huxley’s conviction that medieval Christendom had been nothing but bigotry and backwardness was one that ultimately descended, not from Voltaire, but from Luther. Agnostics — a term coined by Huxley — have always tended to display, in their attitudes towards Christianity, a marked susceptibility towards Protestant propaganda. He is merely another illustration of the great paradox of our age: that Christianity has no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish.

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It is hardly surprising, of course, in a society that has increasingly abandoned the institutional practice of Christianity, yet still clings to its assumptions, its values, its myths, that we should shrink from staring the implications of our current predicament fully in the face. “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”

Such was the warning given almost a century and a half ago by Friedrich Nietzsche: the most radical, because the most unsparingly honest, of modern atheists. He gazed unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. Humanism, despised by Nietzsche as an ideology to which the English were peculiarly prone, was dismissed by him as palpable idiocy:

“When the English actually believe that they know ‘intuitively’ what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment.”

“For the English,” Nietzsche concluded witheringly, “morality is not yet a problem.”

It was not from reason that the doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith which humanists believed themselves — in their conceit — to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead — but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell. The myths of Christianity would long endure. And yet they were no less myths, for all that, because they now wore the show of the secular. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour”: these were Christian through and through.

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Nietzsche lamented what Christians had done to classical civilisation. He admired the Greeks not despite but because of their cruelty. Indeed, so scornful was he of any notion of ancient Greece as a land of sunny rationalism that large numbers of students, by the end of his tenure as a professor, had been shocked into abandoning his classes. “In the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty,” he wrote, “before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now.”

And yet Nietzsche, a man who had renounced his citizenship, despised nationalism, and praised the Jews as the most remarkable people in history, had warned what confusions were bound to follow from the death of God. “When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” Good and evil would become merely relative. Moral codes would drift unanchored. Deeds of massive and terrible violence would be perpetrated. “After a terrible earthquake, a tremendous reflection, with new questions.”

Half a century after Nietzsche wrote this, and almost two decades after the outbreak of the Great War, the Nazis came to power in Germany. Hitler, who in 1928 had loudly proclaimed how Christian his movement was, had come increasingly to share in Nietzsche’s contempt for Christianity. Its morality, its concern for the weak, the Führer viewed as cowardly and shameful. Christian teachings had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mental patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. The churches had had their day. This, in the opinion of devout Nazis, was a conviction bred not of fantasy or faith, but of the proper understanding of science. The strong — as Darwin had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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By Tom Holland

“There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.” These words — with which I opened — were spoken by Heinrich Himmler. Here, in his conviction that Homo sapiens had no claim to a special status, and that it was conceit for humans to imagine themselves somehow superior to the rest of creation, was all the sanction he needed for genocide.

He, at any rate, had understood what licence was opened up by the abandonment of Christianity. Perhaps it is this that lies behind our readiness to accuse those with whom we disagree of being fascists, or Nazis, or Hitler: the dread of what might happen should such words cease to be taken as insults. Certainly, the humanist assumption that atheism and liberalism go together is plainly just that: an assumption. It is not truth that science offers moralists, but a mirror. Racists identify it with racist values; liberals with liberal values. The primary dogma of humanism — “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others” — finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated. The well-spring of humanist values lie not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history: the history of Christianity.

The above is an abridged version of the 2022 Theos Annual Lecture, “Humanism: A Christian Heresy”. 

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

Earlier this year, Baroness Kennedy was contacted by the two daughters of Paul Rusesabagina — human rights campaigner, winner of the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and real-life hero of the film Hotel Rwanda. The pair sought help with their father’s case; he had been kidnapped and jailed by the regime of Paul Kagame, the Rwandan dictator infamous for his government’s use of assassination, imprisonment and smears to silence his critics.

Details of Mitchell’s starring role in what has been branded “the Tories’ second-jobs gravy train” particularly alarms human rights activists, because the 65-year-old MP — who lost his Cabinet post after allegations he called a Downing Street police officer a “pleb” — chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Rwanda. “I’m amazed he can’t see how bad this looks,” said Michela Wrong, author of Do Not Disturb, an expose of the Rwandan regime. “Mitchell’s always been Kagame’s most dogged British defender, never missing a chance to justify the regime’s acts.”

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SouthBridge’s managing director in Kigali is John Birungi, former chief executive of a key RPF-run conglomerate with wide interests stretching from property to security. It has been accused in the past of trading in conflict minerals, while also leasing jets for Kagame despite the impoverished nation’s dependence on foreign aid — including about £900m from Britain since Kagame took control of this nation of 13m people.

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Mitchell has registered his interests as required. These show he also took a three-day trip in 2019 to visit Rwanda’s army academy, funded by its ministry of defence — valued at £5,092 for flights and hotels — despite evidence that the military has been heavily involved in atrocities and the looting of neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. The MP says he spoke on human rights to senior military officers from across Africa at a conference.

Mitchell is also friends with Emmanuel Ndahiro, the Rwandan president’s former doctor and intelligence chief whose phone number was linked in court to an attempted assassination in South Africa. Earlier this year, Freedom House, the US human rights group, cited Rwanda alongside China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey as one of the world’s most prolific practitioners of “transnational repression”. Ndahiro was also named in the Panama Papers as one-time director of an offshore firm reported to own a private jet.

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Human rights law has built into it a deep scepticism of state power, particularly of the untrammelled variety, and so it is a useful lens through which to consider lockdowns. After the Second World War, human rights laws were created to ensure that even during those danger times certain basic rights were protected. But the basic psychology of threats and emergencies remain.

So let us consider a year of Covid-19. Twelve months ago, the first two cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in the UK. Fifty days later, on 23 March, the Prime Minister announced that he would “give the British people a very simple instruction — you must stay at home”. Three days after that, the first set of emergency lockdown regulations arrived. These were undoubtedly the most severe restrictions on liberty imposed in peacetime, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock reportedly described them as “Napoleonic”. “In lockdown”, he told the Cabinet, in a reversal of the usual principle of English law that whatever is not explicitly prohibited is permitted: “people would be forbidden from doing anything unless the legislation said, in terms, that they could”.

It is extraordinary that restrictions which a judge described as “possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever”, could be made without prior Parliamentary scrutiny. But it took just 11 pages of law and one signature for Matt Hancock to impose the 26 March lockdown, which came into effect the moment he put down the pen.

Those 11 pages closed all non-essential businesses, meaning that people could only leave their homes if they had a “reasonable excuse”, and largely banned gatherings between people not of the same household. Any breaches could be punished. The police were also given power to take “such action as is necessary” to break up gatherings or ensure business closed.

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That first lockdown — all 11 pages of it — was, in fact, stricter than the two that followed. The current lockdown law is over 120 pages, and a long list of exceptions — involving bubbles, animal welfare, picketing and “death bed visits” — have been added to the (deceptively) simple edict to stay at home. The rules for businesses have become more complicated too. 64 sets of regulations have followed the first, all using the same emergency procedure. And while the severity of social distancing measures has ebbed and flowed, at no point have they been entirely withdrawn. It is therefore possible to argue that lockdown has never ended, just changed shape.

Indeed, the meaning of “lockdown” remains elusive. It is generally understood as not being able to leave our homes except in limited circumstances. But there are other measures, such as non-essential business and school closures, and bans on gatherings, which some people, and the government, consider part of “lockdown”. There are also the self-isolation rules which became legal requirements at the end of September. These are stricter than the lockdown rules themselves, allowing for leaving home only in emergencies

Some of these measures have a long history. The Old Testament contains rules for individual quarantine. City-wide institutional restrictions were developed to prevent the spread of plague in the Middle Ages. In his 1665 diary of the Plague, Daniel Defoe records measures to prevent public and private gatherings, feasts and begging. Curfews and travel bans were also enacted. During the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu pandemic, American cities prohibited public gatherings, and closed schools, churches and theatres with varying degrees of success.

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But the idea of city or even nationwide lockdowns is of recent vintage. The 2002-4 SARS outbreak led to city-wide restrictions and a guarded quarantine of a housing estate. Mexico imposed a national lockdown to contain the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak. And national lockdowns were imposed in Sierra Leone to control Ebola in 2013 to 2014. The Sierra Leone lockdown was criticised at the time for being heavy-handed, causing food shortages and driving social activity underground. The reality is that, prior to Covid-19, large-scale lockdown had been rare and their efficacy unproven.

So have Covid-19 lockdowns been justified? Were they worth it? And at what cost? These crucial questions, after a year spent in stasis, have become highly politicised — and so even harder to answer.

The starting point must be the indisputable seriousness of Covid-19, a once-in-a-century virus. It spreads easily and in many cases asymptomatically, has a relatively high fatality rate which, when combined with excessive transmission, has already led to over 100,000 deaths in the UK alone. It also causes lasting damage in some survivors. If it is allowed to move through the population at speed, there would be too many serious cases for hospitals to manage.

To put it bluntly, this is as serious a pandemic as the modern world has faced. It therefore requires the kind of restrictions to limit social contact which we have seen during other plagues, such as the quarantine of infectious individuals and gatherings bans. After 10 months of restrictions it appears that the three separate periods of lockdown have assisted in bringing transmission rates under control and saved lives — although the range of measures makes it difficult to know exactly which will work. This is one of the most difficult apects of assessing lockdowns; we cannot say for sure which measures will work and why. And because of the many psychologies of populations experiencing a pandemic, some measures may work in a particular place and time, but not elsewhere and later.

The next question is what restrictions on other liberties, such as preventing ordinary family interactions or stopping children attending school, can therefore be justified and if so to what extent. In human rights law, a number of rights, such as to family life, free speech, peaceful enjoyment of property and education, may be interfered with but only if the interference is for a legitimate reason and is proportionate to the end sought — in other words, is no more than is necessary.

Even if certain lockdown restrictions are proportionate, that does not mean they all are, or that they can be allowed to become permanent. There are three main areas of concern.

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First, some lockdown measures work but they have serious knock-on effects including a shrinking economy (which itself causes higher mortality), delayed cancer treatment and surgery. The move to online education has most severely affected those from lower socio-economic groups. While this doesn’t negate the need for restrictions, it illustrates how damaging they can be and why they must only be used for as long as necessary and no longer.

Second, the method by which lockdown has been imposed in England borders on anti-democratic. There may have been justification in March for using emergency procedures to bypass Parliament but there has not been since. The most severe legal restrictions on liberty require the gold standard of democratic accountability, not a rushed procedure which side-lines Parliament. This has likely led to illiberal outcomes, for example the explicit allowance for protest being removed in early December, meaning that it is unclear whether socially-distanced outdoor protests are a criminal offence or not.

Protest is the lifeblood of liberal society; in a democracy its legality should never be in doubt. It appears the same democratic deficit will apply to the incoming hotel quarantine rules, which involve detaining potentially thousands of citizens. Such an important law should be properly scrutinised.

Third, the lockdown laws themselves have become overly-complex, poorly communicated and almost impossible for a non-lawyer (including the police) to digest. Guidance and law have become elided by both politicians and public, leading to wrongful enforcement and widespread confusion. Then there are the exceptions. On one level, it is positive that exceptions have been added to allow for the many vicissitudes of human life, but they have been at the expense of simplicity.

So we have to ask: have our lockdowns been strict enough to be worth it? This raises something of a paradox from a rights perspective. The UK has one of the highest death rates in the world. Is this because our lockdowns have been too late and too loose, particularly in their later iterations? Might our looser lockdowns, taking into account their collateral damage, been all sound and fury without accomplishing very much, and might stricter, earlier lockdowns have been more justified?

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The question of whether lockdowns have been proportionate is a tricky one. But there is an urgent question for the coming weeks. If the vaccination drive works as planned, and those who are most likely to die from Covid-19 are vaccinated by Spring, the proportionality of lockdown measures will shift. If rates of serious illness and death from Covid plummet, then the justification for general restrictions on liberties will diminish. This will, of course, also depend on whether new strains emerge which are vaccine-resistant.

But hard questions will need to be asked as to what to do next, and it will require a rights-based approach to resolve. It is essential that we don’t enter a semi-permanent state of emergency laws and basic rights switched on and off by the government at will and without democratic scrutiny. Lockdowns may have been necessary, but we cannot be locked down forever.

Yet as with so many sexual issues, old moral norms have been rebottled with new and often contradictory arguments, and with the expansion of human rights law the “right” to sex has returned. This was illustrated last week when the Court of Protection heard a case that digs right down into a central contradiction in contemporary sexual attitudes.

It concerns a mentally disabled man, called only “Z”, who is in the care of his local authority. Z would like to have sex, but feels that his social anxiety prevents him from finding a girlfriend, and is therefore asking his care workers to find him a woman who is prepared to have sex with him for money.

The case has reached the court of protection because it’s not clear if care workers would be breaking the law by granting this request. We know that there have already been instances in this country of the taxpayer indirectly paying for sexual services in brothels and lapdancing clubs both in the UK and abroad, via money that vulnerable adults in the care of the state are permitted to spend on their “mental and physical wellbeing”.

But this case takes us a step further. Psychiatrists have ruled that Z has the capacity to consent to sex and indeed to buy it. He does not, however, have the capacity to manage his own finances, and his care plan includes restrictions on the films and video games he is allowed access to, due to the risk of triggering “inappropriate” behaviour.

In other words, he is not able to actually arrange to buy sex, and therefore requires his carers to take practical steps on his behalf — steps that may or may not be illegal, contrary to section 39 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

I cannot share details on what exactly Z’s “inappropriate” behaviour has consisted of, but I can share facts that have already been reported in the press: that Z has spent several years in a specialist facility, detained under the Mental Health Act, and has told care workers that he has sexual fantasies involving violence and children, and so his care plan is therefore designed to prevent him coming into contact with children.

Buying sex is not illegal in this country, even for men who confess to such disturbing fantasies. It is illegal to keep a brothel, solicit in a public place, or (as of 2009) pay for sex with someone who has been “subjected to force”. So, to get around these legal impediments, Z’s advocates propose that his care workers seek out an escort for him through a charity called the TLC Trust, who provide a registry of self-employed escorts who are willing to have sex with disabled people in exchange for money. In court last week, barristers representing Z and the Local Authority presented the TLC Trust as a safe, responsible and carefully-regulated source of sexual services.

But UnHerd contributor Julie Bindel, who has investigated TLC, is sceptical of this assessment, once arguing that although the organisation is technically a charity, it is really in the business of “peddling the commercial services of individuals and escort agencies advertising sexual services. Checking the websites of the escorts listed shows that they are not particularly targeting disabled men, but simply adding to their customer base.”

TLC is also a campaigning organisation that promotes the decriminalisation and destigmatisation of the sex industry. Foregrounding the “right” of disabled people to access “sexual service providers” has long been a media-friendly strategy employed by such campaigners, since it presents a sanitised and compassionate side to the sex industry.

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I say “disabled people” advisedly, because the people we’re talking about here are actually disabled men, and the “service providers” in question are almost always women, although you’ll rarely hear campaigners spell this out, since “men have the right to have sex with women” doesn’t sound nearly as good as a campaigning slogan.

In fact, when the judge tasked with deciding on Z’s case said this in regards another case, his comments attracted a great deal of controversy. Mr Justice Hayden had been asked to consider imposing a court order preventing a man from having sex with his disabled wife because her carers believed that she was no longer able to give her consent, and during proceedings he remarked “I cannot think of any more obviously fundamental human right than the right of a man to have sex with his wife.”

This did not go down at all well with feminist commentators, the criminalisation of marital rape being a hard-won legal battle in this country, only fully won in 2003.

It remains to be seen what Mr Justice Hayden decides in Z’s case; a judgment is expected by the end of the year and will potentially set an important precedent, since a key plank of Z’s argument is that he has a right to a sexual life, protected by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. He therefore insists that the state must not only meet his needs for food, shelter and medical care, but must also facilitate his desire to have sex. Which means, of course, that someone else has to have sex with Z, and if no one is willing to do so for free, then their consent must be bought.

But then, to be fair to Z, his demands do follow on logically from two assumptions about sex that hold sway among many Westerners in the 21st century, despite the fact that they are in tension with one another.

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The first is that sex is not a want, but a need: that it is impossible to live a happy and fulfilled life without sexual intimacy since, although historically there have been established and high status social roles available to celibate people — primarily through the Church — these have now faded away, leaving only a contemptuous attitude towards celibacy: at best, it is eccentric; at worst, suspect.

The second assumption is that sex is a leisure activity that is only invested with meaning if the participants choose to give it meaning – it has no intrinsic specialness, is not innately different from any other kind of social interaction, and it can therefore be commodified without any trouble. People can understand their own sexual encounters as meaningful or even sacred, but there’s no obligation on them to do so.

As the American writer Aaron Sibarium puts it, “if the scientific revolution disenchanted the world… the sexual revolution disenchanted sex.”

If we accept both of these assumptions, then we have to accept a difficult contradiction: that sex is at the same time as essential a need as food or water, but also as trivial as going to the cinema or getting your nails done. According to this logic, sex is simply a service that one person can perform for another, but it is a service that must be performed — that must even, in cases like Z’s, be facilitated by the state.

Z is asking for access to some anonymous, replaceable woman (albeit, presumably, an attractive one) in whom he can relieve his sexual frustration. And he insists that not doing so would violate his Article 8 rights.

If Z wins, we should thus expect a disabled man’s hypothetical care team to grow beyond cleaners, cooks and taxi drivers to include a female worker whose role is to give out blow jobs. And we will all be asked to pretend that the service this worker provides is no different from any other service, since apparently, as Mr Justice Hayden said during proceedings last week, “we’re not here to pass moral judgments about people’s decisions in the sphere of their private life or their decision to go to a sex worker.”

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Except we all know that this is not a service like any other, and that we should not suspend our “moral judgments” when it comes to the sex industry. For one thing, in what other line of work are workers so often left with PTSD, suffering rates far higher than military veterans? In what other industry does youth carry such a premium, with a worker’s pay actually declining as she gains more experience? What other work can routinely be carried out with the worker drugged or unconscious? And what other industry so reliably attracts trafficking, and violence, regardless of its legal status?

The whole point of paid sex is that it must be paid. It is not mutually desired by both parties — one party is there unwillingly, in exchange for money, or sometimes other goods like drugs, food or shelter. The person being paid (almost always a woman) must ignore her own lack of sexual desire, or even her bone-deep revulsion. She must suppress her most self-protective instincts in the service of another person’s sexual pleasure. There is a reason that this industry usually attracts only the poorest and the most desperate women. It is the same reason that the Crown Prosecution Service guidelines explicitly address prostitution as “sexual exploitation”.

If Z wins his case, the judgment will lend legitimacy to the sex industry. It will also affirm the idea that sex is both meaningless and a “right” to be claimed by men, at the expense of women. And such a decision would embolden those who consider male feelings of sexual frustration to be very important — but consider female feelings of sexual violation to not be important at all.

It’s a shame that Z regrets his lack of a sex life. But it is not the responsibility of the state to sexually satisfy every frustrated, entitled and potentially dangerous man who demands it. Z needs state care, but he desires sexual intimacy, and the difference between these needs and desires should be obvious: no one has ever died for want of sex.

The US Congress passed an Act in 2012 that legislated for asset freezes and travel bans abroad but at the time our government was having none of it and blocked the idea: we cared only about raking in cash, morals be damned. Now that MP, Dominic Raab, is Foreign Secretary and his old initiative is being implemented: sanctions have been imposed against individuals in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Myanmar and North Korea. As the Government scrambles around to define ‘Global Britain’, could “defender of human rights” be part of the narrative?

In a sense this is a return to an older British image. During the Cold War the UK combined economic, cultural and political achievements to forge a greater narrative about our superior rights and freedoms: Parliamentary debates, Amnesty International, the BBC, the Beatles and the City of London were all part of one great story of ‘freedom’, in contrast to the dour state-officiated five-year plans, politburo diktat, censorship and food shortages of the USSR. In the following decades the talk of political freedoms were gradually relegated to the little leagues of foreign policy, and economic links became pre-eminent as the UK, or a few postcodes in London at least, became the capital of globalisation. Officials would sometimes mumble something about how economic integration would lead to authoritarian regimes becoming ‘more like us’ and adopting political freedoms, but if anyone ever really thought that true it now seems laughable.

Quite the opposite. When London gleefully took the money of kleptocrats and human rights abusers the cynical spin masters of the Kremlin and beyond could chortle and point. Instead of becoming ‘like us’ it showed that all that time we were just the same as them.

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If, and it’s a big if, the Magnitsky Act is implemented effectively it could signal a revival of standing up for political freedoms (or at least a little more than Brussels, which could be a motivation in and of itself). But what does it mean to speak up for human rights today? We live in a world where much of the Cold War language of ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ has been hacked, twisted and corrupted. Far-right extremists in Europe, for example, now argue they want to get rid of all Muslims from the continent to defend our ‘liberal’ traditions and women’s rights.

Or take my specialist subject: media and propaganda. It used to be easy to define a democratic information environment as opposed to a dictatorship’s: we had freedom of speech as opposed to censorship; pluralism as opposed the state’s single voice. These days it’s much harder to tell the difference. From Mexico to Manila, Moscow to DC politicians have learnt to flood the zone with so much information and disinformation people become confused, despair of telling fact from fiction.

In very different political systems cyber militias and troll farms are used to drown out dissenting voices, accusing them of being ‘fake news’ or ‘enemies of the people’, a sort of censorship through noise. And when critical journalists or opposition politicians complain of coming under attack from these online mobs, the reply from the government is cynical but crafty: ‘These online accounts are just exercising their freedom of speech! Isn’t that what democracy is all about? It’s now you, the so-called democrats, who want censorship!” And in a sense they’re right. There’s nothing in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights about ‘disinformation’ being illegal; it states only that people should have the right to give and receive information.

The first regulatory proposals that democracies have come up with to deal with the deluge of disinformation is to try to pass laws to suppress what the UK Online Harms White Paper calls ‘legal but harmful speech’, a new category that includes ‘disinformation’. These proposals have appalled human rights groups: creating new, vague, and often subjective types of speech to control is exactly the sort of thing authoritarian regimes do. This is a solution that delights the Putins and Xis of this world, who are already conjuring up ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ laws that allow them to arrest anyone they care to. In trying to save democracy from disinformation, we risk boosting authoritarians.

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By John Gray

For the past two years I’ve been part of a transatlantic group of policymakers, academics and tech types that’s been trying to find a way of imagining what an internet in line with human rights could look like — and which different democracies could agree on. Do you really have to sacrifice freedoms to save democracy? What does freedom of speech mean in an age of bots, trolls and cyborgs?

At the start it looked like we could never find common ground: American free speech fundamentalists argued that any control on content was authoritarian; people who’ve experienced how actual authoritarians twist freedom of speech to crush any critical voices despaired. But after much debate a consensus began to emerge. We began to think about ‘disinformation’ not just as a type of content, but as a type of deceptive behaviour.

The problem with the cyber militias and troll farms is not so much individual pieces of content they post, but the way they distribute them en masse in a way that looks organic, as if it’s real citizens exercising their freedom of speech, when in reality these are hidden, coordinated campaigns from a single source.

This sort of mass, inauthentic campaign actually takes away people’s right to receive information about its origins, to understand how the information environment around them is shaped. I’m not talking about individual anonymity — that’s an important right — but the warping of reality where what seems to be one person saying something online is actually part of a network of accounts all saying the same thing, at the same time, according to lines passed down from a hidden manipulator.

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This sort of ‘viral deception’, as we began to call it, is the sort of behaviour that can be regulated against. And most importantly this is in the spirit of Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights: it’s a demand for more information, not less. As David Kaye, the UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and one of the members of our group said:

“Another way to conceptualise the impact and purpose of viral deception is as a tool to interfere with the individual’s right to information. Coordinated amplification…interferes with the individual’s right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Conceived this way, it seems to me that solutions could be aimed at enhancing individual access to information rather than merely protecting against public harm.”

Ultimately, what does it mean to be a democratic citizen online? It should mean understanding who is targeting content at you and how. Which of your own data is being used to target you and why. Whether the content you see from, shall we say, a political campaign is the same content your neighbour sees. It should mean public oversight of algorithms so we understand why we see one thing online and not another.

We live in a strange paradox: on the one hand there’s more content than ever before and less censorship, even in authoritarian countries. But there is a new form of censorship: we have no idea how the information environment around us is shaped. We are like Caliban on Prospero’s island, surrounded by digital weather and weird sounds that drive us into social media swells of panics and hysterias, but which we cannot make sense of because it is all dictated from behind a cloak. This cloak needs to be ripped away. And this, of course, is the sort of transparency dictatorships don’t want: the rulers of Beijing and Moscow don’t want their citizens to know how they monitor and manipulate their data; how they rig algorithms so people see what they want them to see.

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The UK could take the lead in formulating what a democratic information environment is in the 21st century. We have already committed to making media freedom one of the aims of our foreign policy (with Amal Clooney fronting our campaign no less), but to be relevant in the media debate now you need to coordinate democracies on how to define freedom in the new digital space too.

There’s a security aspect to this also. Until we define the democratic standards of online behaviour, we can’t nail what’s so wrong with hostile states, such as Russia but also increasingly China and Iran, using covert, digital campaigns to influence our politics and interests — whether that’s to attack the Magnitsky Act, subvert the credibility of our elections or destabilise our friends in Ukraine. If we had even the simplest rules around transparency of coordinated campaigns, we would have a legal and philosophical platform to argue that Russia’s use of non-transparent bots and trolls and Facebook groups in the UK is an offence. At the moment there’s little difference in how domestic disinformation works and how foreign adversaries wage it.

But that’s always been the twist in promoting your ‘global’ image: it reverberates back home. In the Cold War the US was partly spurred on to pass civil rights legislation because its racist laws were being hammered by Soviet propaganda, undermining the US foreign policy narrative as the world’s defender of universal freedoms.

In today’s weirdly interconnected world the outer and the inner are more intertwined than ever. Dominic Raab may sit in the Foreign Office, but he’s defining the most domestic and internal of agendas.

Once the two minutes were up, little Sara looked at me and asked: “You know that man with the beard? Is he good or is he bad?”

I love the honesty of children. Throughout the past three years of documenting Jordan Peterson’s phenomenal, controversial, influential catapult onto the world stage following his public criticism of Canadian human rights legislation, political correctness, identity politics and the release of his overwhelmingly successful self-help book 12 Rules for Life, I’ve been asked the same question Sara asked me in different forms by journalists, strangers, friends and colleagues. Whose side are you on? Do you think he’s right or wrong? Is he having a positive impact or is he dangerous?

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I intentionally mirrored the essence of this question in the trailer as a starting place for the film. Not only does Peterson’s name divide a room, but any two media sources will paint starkly divergent pictures of him and his ideas. Of course this is not unique to Peterson, but it is striking.

It seems that being objective or unbiased is no longer viewed as a high value in journalism or documentary film-making. The keynote address at the last Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival, focused on the question: whose stories are being told by whom? The popular and applauded ethos in documentary film-making now is identity-driven stories made by people of those identities.

Part of the rationale for this is the fact that there’s a history of insensitive and ignorant film-making that caricatured indigenous peoples and members of minority groups, which has led to this approach to documentary film culture. We also know there’s no such thing as being unbiased and we know that people who are not from particular identity groups are less likely to understand the experience of people within those groups. But we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater if the new moral imperative is to be solely one with your tribe and to tell positive stories to advance the goals of that tribe, especially at the expense of truth. One can argue that all art is propaganda, but there are certainly degrees of difference.

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While following this story, the undercurrent of the culture wars was very salient to me. I was struck by the way Peterson rose to stardom as a polarising figure, embodying both the hero and the villain. So much so that even my documentary about him has become controversial. Complaints by cinema staff led to three screening cancellations — one for a week-long run in Toronto that was scheduled to follow our premiere in September.

And all of this came after many mainstream and arthouse cinemas declined to show the film because of fear of controversy, fear of social reprimand, or ethical and safety concerns related to drawing in Jordan Peterson fans. The film isn’t a celebratory fluff piece, however, nor is it a hit piece, but even when this was acknowledged, the nuance of the film was also seen as a setback. People will pay money to watch feel-good films about their heroes, not to see complexity, I was told.

I began this film in 2015 with interest in a human story. But when Peterson published the controversial Professor Against Political Correctness videos in 2016, he drew a line at what he believed he should be forced to say, and many people drew a line at him — it was no longer ethical to humanise him. It forced me to consider the question: as a film-maker, when does it become unethical to explore a person or topic in a film? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and I continue to land in the same place: I think any person or topic is fair game, but it’s the approach and treatment that matters.

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Interestingly, I’ve also faced resistance to the film’s human approach from a completely different angle. Some people want to engage with the myth of Jordan Peterson only in the realm of ideas, not as a human being. They don’t want to hear from his wife and close friends (and enemies); they want to hear him talk about philosophy and religion and the meaning of life.

On one hand, I understand the desire to find the discussion of ideas in the film, if that’s what drew you to Peterson. After all, that’s what caught my attention 15 years ago, but those ideas are already all over the internet. I wasn’t interested in a talking-head film about ideas; I wanted to explore how living out those ideas manifests in real life. And it’s messy. I can’t help wonder if deep down this reaction is a rejection of the discomfort that comes with the unknown and seeing vulnerable human beings in a messy world where theories become imperfect. 

Similarly, the cancellations of our film screenings came from staff complaints of discomfort with the film content. To see Peterson as a human being — captivating, flawed, vulnerable — is to come out of the ideological zone of right and wrong, of the identity-based ethos of privileged white man versus vulnerable trans people, of black and white. Such social analysis based on identity does have its value, but it’s limiting and, taken strictly, it can be dangerous.

Working on this film forced me to endure uncomfortable ethical questioning. And it seemed to me that if there’s one thing I could contribute to the culture wars, I hoped it could be a framing that is grounded in humanity.

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The trailer for The Rise of Jordan Peterson ends with an impromptu moment I captured while setting up an interview with Peterson. He unexpectedly said: “Are we ready? Then we can do this. This is what I actually look like” as he looked into the camera lens. Then he leaned down and pulled a mask over his face and said: “This is what people who don’t like me think I look like.” The green mask with devil horns, a Kwakwaka’wakw wild-man mask carved by his friend, the artist Charles Joseph, looks like a monster. 

There are many layers to this moment. Peterson believes that you can’t be a good person unless you’re also a monster. You need to meet and understand your dark side in order to avoid letting it take over you. You also need to have a spine so you don’t become a pushover, easily overtaken by someone else’s scheme. Another layer is the idea cited by the Russian author and critic of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that the line between good and evil runs through the human heart. 

At that moment on camera, I asked Peterson: “Which one is real?”

“Good question,” he said as he placed the mask down. With serious intensity, he replied: “They’re both real.”

Every good film reveals both the specific and the universal. And yes, Peterson is both, and so are we all.

The Rise of Jordan Peterson is available for pre-order on Apple TV and will be available to watch on other digital platforms worldwide on 8 November

For what it is worth, my own position on abortion is one I suspect many people share. My instincts are pro-choice when the ‘baby’ is still a cluster of cells and they become increasingly pro-life the nearer the baby – dropping the inverted commas – is to term. And I think things are morally fuzzy somewhere between the two.

Personhood is an emergent concept and one that cannot be readily pinned to a definitive date within a pregnancy, when it suddenly, magically springs into being. I understand that the law has its needs, and clarity about exactly when an abortion is acceptable and unacceptable is a part of those needs. The miracle of life, however, does not lend itself neatly to the requirements of law.

But the recent case of the unnamed young woman who was ordered by the court to have a termination against her will is not exactly an argument about the ethics of abortion per se, more about the nature of consent and the limits of the courts in this most sensitive of subjects. And it raises a number of very thorny issues.

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The facts of the case are as follows. A young woman in her twenties – though with the mental age of a six to nine-year-old – is pregnant. The baby is 22 weeks in gestation, and healthy. The young woman and her family are Roman Catholics. She says that she wants to have the child, and her family want her to have it too. The pregnant woman’s mother is a former midwife and has said she will help care for the child.

But Mrs Justice Lieven in the UK Court of Protection argued that due to the diminished mental capacity of the mother, she should be forced to have an abortion. The NHS Trust that is responsible for looking after the pregnant woman advised this course of action. Her social worker disagreed. The judge apparently took the view that this is not a case of the women’s right to choose because the woman in question doesn’t have the mental capacity to make a reasoned choice. “I think she would like to have baby in the same way that she would like to have a nice doll,” the judge commented.

In subsequent developments, the Court of Appeal has overturned this ruling, and it seems now that the pregnancy will continue to term. But the original decision of the Court of Protection, and the advice of the NHS, remains troubling. What level of mental capacity is required for a woman to have the right to choose whether or not to proceed with her pregnancy?

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Indeed, would those who defend a woman’s right to choose be happy if the situation was reversed. What if the woman in question didn’t want to proceed with the pregnancy but the court decided she was not in a position to make that judgment and thus forced her to continue with the pregnancy? Would her limited mental capacity disqualify her from making this choice too?

I don’t ask this in a polemical way; rather, I want to suggest that the original decision of the Court of Protection could be seen to cut both ways. For however much that decision was regretted by pro-life campaigners, there is also potential threat in that decision for the defenders of choice too.

At the heart of all this is a debate about what makes a person’s choice informed and rational. And also, who, in the absence of the pregnant woman’s fully developed appreciation of the consequences of having a child, should be making the decision on her behalf: the court or her family? That original decision assumes a government authority will have a better sense of the woman’s best interest than her own family.

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I do not believe the first judge acted out of anything other than a concern for the well-being of the pregnant women. “I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the state to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn’t want it is an immense intrusion,” she admitted. For me, however, and in these particular circumstances, this feels like an intrusion too far.

Part of the reason I am generally hesitant to talk about the ethics of abortion, and dislike the tiresome pontificating on both sides of the debate, is that the circumstances of moral decision making about such weighty matters are almost invariably particular and unique, they always involve a consideration of very specific family circumstances. But this case introduces a new element: a court deciding it knows better than the pregnant woman and her family. And on that matter, outside observers are right to take an interest.

On the question of whether or not a woman with diminished mental capacities is in a position to make an informed and reasoned choice, I offer two observations. First, part of the process of growing up as a child is that one is exposed to – and allowed and encouraged to make – more and more choices about the things that effect your world.

By six, and certainly by nine, the child is making reasoned choices all the time. And while a child’s choices are not always good ones, and parents have to accept final responsibility, one cannot simply discount the wishes of a child, or of a woman with the mental age of a child. This is not a determinative point, but it needs seriously to be taken into account.

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Second, and not unrelated, even in adulthood we make decisions the consequences of which are unknown, especially when it comes to having children. Who among us really understands fully how the arrival of a child will affect our life? Some practise their capacity for care – on dolls for instance – but when it comes to children we don’t ever know what will be really required of us until it is.

Like personhood, the ability to make an informed choice does not appear, hey presto, according to some date in the calendar. Again, the law has its needs. But the law does not always map moral reality as closely as we might like. I know some nine-year-olds that I would trust with making an informed choice more than I would trust some 29-year-olds. Again, not determinative. But a consideration nonetheless.

The presence of religion in this case could be seen as a complicating factor. Some may worry the religion of the mother is being imposed on the young woman and should thus be discounted. Equally, there may be those who would question the ideological disposition of the judge and how that affects her judgment in this case. Personally, I see no reason to assume bad faith either way. The question here is simple: do we trust the pregnant woman and her parents or the courts to make this decision?

One of the underlying issues here may be whether we feel moral decisions like this should be made on the basis of, and in the context of love – something personal, emotional, spiritual, relational – or whether these questions require something less subjective and more like an objective calculation of general utility and wellbeing. And here I feel more confident in my response. In my book, a human-centred approach to incredibly difficult questions such as this are always to be preferred to bureaucratic and institutional ones. And that means, broadly speaking, families should trump courts.

The Court of Appeal has taken away this conflict, for now and in this case, at least. But a door has been opened. Our culture wars about abortion tend to make us immediately run towards defending entrenched pro-life or pro-choice positions. This troubling case should make us do neither. For there is trouble enough here for both sides.

Numinous objects of piety and reverence, rights carry an authority no moral or political argument can match. As a result, questions in ethics and politics to which in the past there could be a variety of reasonable responses are now seen as having only one correct answer. If you find that answer unsatisfactory, you are not just disagreeing with other people. You are rejecting an imperative from which dissent is not permitted.

The position of rights is particularly incongruous in this country. More than in any other modern state, Britain’s constitution consists of precedents and conventions arising from historic political settlements. There is no body of rights codified in law that can constrain the sovereignty of parliament, while parliament itself is governed by precedent and accepted procedures.

The European Convention of Human Rights was incorporated into UK law in the Human Rights Act of 1998, and since then, the judges of what has become Britain’s Supreme Court can determine whether the rights recognised in the Convention are being respected by governments and legislators. But authority and legitimacy still reside in parliament rather than in any judicial body, and the ultimate determinant in any major public issue remains a political decision, not a legal interpretation.

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A situation in which major issues are resolved through the compromises of politics is intolerable to contemporary liberal thinkers. For them, law is a repository of moral truth, which can be determined beyond reasonable doubt. Disagreement on basic moral issues is evidence of error, which law should correct. If you think like this, British institutions are fundamentally defective.

So it is that there are continuous demands from legal scholars and journalistic commentators that our constitutional arrangements be overhauled so that human rights can constrain what any government can do. In this way, Britain can approach the higher rationality that is evident in countries such as the US, where law has a far greater role in the political process.

Jonathan Sumption’s Reith lectures on “Law and the Decline of Politics” present a considered response to these demands. His argument throughout is that inflating human rights beyond a baseline guaranteeing individual security and freedoms of expression and association imposes too great a burden on law, and leads to a dangerous shrinkage in political participation. Effectively, law is usurping politics:

“The problem about the legal model is that it marginalises the political process. When a judge identifies something as a constitutional, or a human, or a fundamental right, he is saying that it derives from a higher law than the ordinary decision-making processes of the state. He is declaring that its existence and extent are not to be determined by political choice. Yet, very many judicial decisions about fundamental rights are themselves political choices only made by a smaller and unrepresentative body of people.”

Here, Sumption captures the chief failing of the prevailing doctrine of rights. Politics is not constrained but confined to a small body of people. Judges are assumed to be able to provide answers to questions that the political processes of a democratic state are unfit to decide. Over time, the range of these questions has expanded to the point that practically every public issue is framed in terms of rights. More and more issues are taken to law, while ever fewer are settled by public political choice. As the empire of rights expands, politics shrivels away.

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There is more wisdom in Sumption’s five short lectures than could be gleaned from reading innumerable volumes of political and legal philosophy that have appeared in recent decades. Listening to them, I was reminded of an academic seminar I attended some 30 years ago. It was addressed by one of the leading lights of American jurisprudence. During the discussion that followed the paper, the speaker was asked how people with HIV/AIDS should be treated. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied: “They should be accorded the full protection of their rights under the constitution.”

While sympathising with the speaker’s concern for the wellbeing of people with HIV/AIDS, I could not help noting a certain absurdity in his response. The seminar was taking place in Oxford, and there were no embedded rights in the British constitution at the time. His response made sense only if he was invoking the American constitution (as he interpreted it) and took for granted that its authority was universal. None of the other participants questioned this assumption or gave any sign of finding it strange. I left shortly afterwards.

At that point in the late Eighties, an American discourse of rights had already displaced the British liberal tradition embodied in the work of John Stuart Mill. It tends to be forgotten that Mill is not a theorist of rights. It is true that his celebrated principle of liberty, which forbids curbing individual liberty except when harm to others may be done, stakes out a protected zone of individual freedom. But the scope of that zone is not determined by rights. It is identified by a calculus of utility, the results of which will vary according to changing circumstances.

What is forbidden in one place or time many not be prohibited in others. It may make sense to legalise drugs if the harm done by drug use is mainly to small numbers of drug users. If the number of drug users is large and there are harmful effects on society at large, the calculus may point to other policies. The background to Mill’s liberalism is not a supreme court interpreting human rights but a body like the House of Commons (where Mill himself served as an MP for some years), which frames and amends legislation in the light of its changing impact on general welfare.

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An absence of ethics is driving our mass anxieties

By Paul Collier

As an attempt to revive this British tradition, Sumption’s lectures make a pivotal contribution to public discourse. We need reminding that the empire of rights is recent and comes with large costs. Whether Sumption’s argument will be heeded is doubtful, however. The hollowing out of politics that has occurred, along with the expansion of rights, is hardly inadvertent. It reflects the anti-political liberalism that is in vogue in English-speaking countries.

As formulated by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin among others, American liberal legalism understands politics as a sphere of collective decision-making containing only what is left over once the demands of justice and rights have been met. The marginalisation of politics is the principal objective of the new liberalism that has come to power over the past generation.

Of course, politics cannot actually be eradicated from the judicial process. It is clearly visible in the appointment of American Supreme Court judges. Bret Kavanagh was appointed in a hideously embarrassing spectacle of naked and crude political partisanship. But politics is pervasive throughout the judicial process. When competing interpretations of rights are being adjudicated, what is being decided is which among a range of rival political outlooks will prevail.

Jurisprudential disputes between ‘originalists’ who aim to stick to what the constitution was intended to mean, and others who want the freedom to apply its principles in new conditions, are political conflicts pursued by legal means. The underlying questions have to do not with law but the proper functions of government. Theories of rights cannot offer an escape from politics because they are themselves political ideologies.

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What's so illiberal about debating abortion?

By Ruth Dudley Edwards

At times, Sumption seems to hark back to a time when law was less politicised because more scope was allowed to democratic choice. But law is inevitably shaped in some degree by prevailing political ideas, and today it cannot avoid the formative influence of the ruling version of liberalism. In his first lecture, Sumption observes that ours is “a censorious age”, the product of “growing moral and social absolutism which looks to produce conformity”, not unlike the stifling climate in Victorian England after the Evangelical Movement transformed the lax sensibilities of Georgian times.

But he fails to note how liberalism has mutated from being a philosophy of tolerance that allows individuals and communities with different values to live together peaceably, to one that aims to enforce what are judged to be the correct values on everybody. Along with the practice of public shaming and ostracism, the proliferation of rights is one of the central strategies adopted to achieve this end.

The result is a culture of conformity in some ways more repressive than that of Victorian times. John Stuart Mill may have complained bitterly against the tyranny of public opinion, but what he had to contend with was chiefly unpleasant gossip about his irregular friendship with Harriet Taylor. He was not threatened in his career or livelihood, whereas dissidents from today’s orthodoxies may face being driven from both.

The censoriousness of rights-based cultures today is not accidental. The inflation of rights endangers not only democracy but also personal freedom, for it de-legitimates what was once an accepted diversity of moral viewpoints. If only one view of a contentious issue — abortion, say — is judged to be in accord with human rights, all other views are not only mistaken, but criminal. My own views are strongly pro-choice. But where societies are deeply divided it is worth seeking a compromise, never fixed or final, which most people can live with, and on this basis a liberal abortion regime has been achieved in many countries. If the US remains polarised on this and other issues, one reason is that they have been framed in terms of rights.

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Liberal individualism is killing the planet

By James Bloodworth

An over-extended empire of rights comes with a number of disadvantages. It hollows out democracy by removing ever more issues from public political choice. It imperils personal freedom by criminalising what used to be legitimate moral differences and polarises society by turning those differences into conflicts that cannot be settled by reasonable compromise. In all of these ways, the empire of rights has the effect of undermining social acceptance of liberal values.

But the illiberal empire of rights has another and more fundamental disadvantage. It is inherently unstable. There are many ways of understanding populism, but one that seems plausible to me is that it is a reaction against an attempt to remove certain issues from the domain of democratic decision-making. If only one view of immigration is deemed rational and morally tolerable, the issue is effectively excluded from public debate. At the same time, a space is created for demagogues.

Denying expression to a widespread public concern is rarely sustainable for long in a functioning democracy. If those who feel this concern are dismissed as retrograde and racist, they will soon flock to leaders who mobilise and accentuate their fears. Populism is a backlash against the expanding empire of rights and a warning that the empire is in danger of bringing about not only its own downfall, but that of liberal societies themselves.

Spare a thought, too, for the Queen. As this is a state visit, the monarch, as head of state, is the host not the PM. I can’t imagine that Her Majesty is looking forward to honouring a man who is likely to bring large numbers of her own subjects out on the streets in protest. 

Still, she’s had worse.

By my count, there have been 111 state visits during her long reign. Some of the visiting heads of state have been constitutional monarchs or ceremonial presidents, but the Queen has also played host to many of the most powerful men and women of the age – some of them proper wrong ‘uns. Here’s a personal top ten:

10. François Mitterrand

Before getting to the actual blood-soaked dictators, let’s ease into it with some less spectacular examples of dodginess.

Politicians don’t get more ambiguous than François Mitterrand, who was the President for 14 years from 1981 to 1995 (his state visit to the UK was in 1984). However, his first job in government was as a mid-ranking functionary in the collaborationist Vichy regime. Mitterrand’s supporters always emphasised his links to the Resistance – though his critics say that his working to undermine the enemy from within was more a case of a foot in both camps.

No modern American President – not even Trump or Nixon – comes close to the twists and turns, smoke and mirrors, of Mitterrand’s career. But because it all happened in another language and with infinitely more finesse, we, in the English-speaking world, barely paid attention.

9. Emperor Hirohito

Despite being awarded the Order of the Francisque for his efforts, Mitterrand did not have a senior position in the Vichy regime. Hirohito, however, was the Japanese head of state during the second World War (and indeed during the Empire of Japan’s invasion of China which began 1931).

Debate still continues as to the extent of his responsibility for Japanese war crimes, but he was more than a puppet of the governments in this period.

While Hideki Tojo, the wartime Prime Minister, was arrested and executed following Japan’s surrender, Hirohito was not only spared, but kept on as Emperor – playing an important role in Japan’s transition to democracy and membership of the ‘western’ alliance.

It was in this capacity that he was welcomed to Britain on a state visit to Britain in 1971. There were protesters – thousands of them, including many former prisoners of war. Despite having suffered so much more than those who turned out to shout at Trump last year, the 1971 protesters were silent – turning their backs on Hirohito as he travelled by horse drawn carriage to Buckingham Palace.

8. The jailbirds

The Palace was where the Obamas stayed during their 2011 visit – the ‘Belgian Suite‘ to be exact. Due to renovations, the Trumps will stay elsewhere, but I expect it won’t be too shabby.

The present accommodations of some of the Queen’s former guests are not so enviable. Looking down the list I see that former President Park Geun-hye of South Korea (visited 2013) is currently serving a 25 year jail sentence, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil (2006) is serving 12 years and former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (1991) was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012, but was released in 2017.

Say what you like about the Donald, but at least he hasn’t been jailed yet.

7. The Gulf monarchies

No list of state visits to the United Kingdom would be complete without a mention of the Al Thanis (Qatar), the Al Sabahs (Kuwait), the Al Nahyans (Abu Dhabi), the Al Khalifas (Bahrain), the Al Saids (Oman), and, of course, the Al Sauds (Saudi Arabia). During the Queen’s reign there have been 11 state visits from the rulers of the Gulf states – almost 10% of the total.

It may be that the Windsors like hanging out with their fellow royals. Or it might be something to do with oil. Royal or oil. One or the other.

6. Hasan II

And now a visitor from the other end of the Arab world – King Hassan II of Morocco, who reigned from 1961 to 1999. His rule was harsh, to say the least – but as a pro-western ruler in a difficult region that was overlooked.

Less overlooked was the treatment of Queen Elizabeth II on her state visit to Morocco in 1980. This was the so-called “tour from hell” – a chaotic affair involving the Moroccan monarch being late for various events or not turning up at all. At one point the Queen was left waiting for hours in the desert sun. Not cool.

Still, all was forgiven – and Hasan made his state visit to the UK in 1987 – a mere seven years later.

5. Hastings Banda

From north Africa to southern Africa – and Hastings Banda, officially ‘Life President’ of Malawi. It was a title he took very seriously – clinging on to power from independence in 1960s until well into the 90s and, indeed, his 90s. His regime’s human rights record was as one might expect, but as a firm friend of the West, it wasn’t held against him – hence his state visit in 1985.

4. Mobutu Sese Seko

Part of the problem with mere presidents is that on formal occasions – like a state visit – they can appear quite dull compared to a monarch. A grey suit, no matter how well cut, can’t really compete with a crown.

However, the President of Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of Congo as it is now called) was an exception. Mobutu Sese Seko – who was in power from 1965 to 1997 – was famous for his leopard skin hat. It’s always annoying when someone copies your look, which is why he banned all leopard skin hats apart from his own.

Being on the right side during the Cold War also helped with his image. His 1973 state visit to Britain was a sign of the West’s favour. Whether or not he stayed in the Belgian Suite (see above) I’m not sure. It might have been considered inappropriate given what the Belgians did to his country when King Leopold II owned it as his personal possession.

Mobutu Sese Seko’s rule wasn’t quite as horrific as Leopold’s, but that didn’t stop him from becoming immensely rich.

3. Robert Mugabe

And thus we come to another African tyrant – Robert Mugabe, whose state visit was in 1994. He didn’t just get tea with the Queen, but also an honorary knighthood. It was, however, stripped from him in 2008 – following the slaughter of political opponents. Quite what was different about this slaughter compared to some other slaughters that took place in Zimbabwe before the 1994 visit I couldn’t tell you.

2. Nicolae Ceaușescu

Mugabe wasn’t the first Marxist dictator to get a honorary knighthood. That precedent was set in 1978 when President Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania came away from his state visit with a K (specifically the Grand Cross Order of the Bath).

To be fair he did reciprocate, awarding the Queen the Star of the Socialist Republic of Romania – first class, no less. They didn’t just hand that out to anyone, you know – other recipients included Nikita Krushchev and Kim Il-sung.

What on earth was the then British government thinking? It’s true that Ceaușescu had turned against Moscow, raising hopes of fractures in the Communist Bloc. But at home his regime was utterly brutal – vying only with Enver Hoxha’s Albania for the extent of its totalitarianism.

Ceaușescu’s knighthood was revoked in 1989, but by that time this was the least of his worries – he was too busy fleeing the capital (to no avail, he and his wife were arrested and executed).

1. Xi Jinping

Speaking of communists, the Queen has put on a right royal show for no less than three Chinese Presidents – Jiang Zemin (1999), Hu Jintao (2005) and, most recently, Xi Jinping in 2015. There were some protests for Xi’s state visit, but a small fraction of those likely to turn out against Trump.

Why is this? Yes, Trump is Trump and unworthy to be President. But compare the noisy disapprobation directed at his travel ban on visitors from some Muslim countries with, say, the muted response to the mass persecution of Muslims in China – where, by some estimates, there are more than a million Muslim Uighurs in detention camps.

This is far from the only issue in which we see such inconsistency in outrage levels. Whether it’s on women’s rights, LGBT rights or environmental issues – the discrepancies are glaring.

Why are western leaders, especially those from English-speaking countries, held to higher standards than other leaders? Is it that more is expected from some parts of the world than others? And, if so, isn’t that a bit racist?

Of course, familiarity breeds contempt – and the faults of one’s closest relations tend to loom larger than those of more distant nations. But if that’s the case and the protesters really are the internationalists they consider themselves to be, then shouldn’t they educate themselves? Or perhaps it’s the other way round – with British activists assuming they have more influence on American politics than on Chinese politics? There’s half a point there, but the other half is that most Americans don’t give a fig for our opinions on their politics.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that in democratic societies, street protests are largely the preserve of the Left. For some reason, the more conservatively-minded prefer the ballot box to walking down the road shouting things. Therefore, the visiting leaders who get shouted at the most are those who suit some kind of Left-wing agenda. When non-western leaders do attract protest, for instance the Saudis, it tends be those who illustrate the compromises and hypocrisies of our own foreign policy.

Fair enough. One can’t look down the list of state visits and not feel a little bit sick.

Still, this is a country where one can scream insults at powerful men and go home without a broken head – so there’s always that.

I see why victims of sexual assault are concerned. I sympathise with fears that their personal lives will be raked over by defence lawyers seeking to exonerate the accused. Our justice system allows character slurs to be aired in court to the extent that sometimes the victim feels as though they were the one on trial. Signing up to what has been described as a “digital strip search” makes victims feel like they are the criminals.

The police, for their part, say they are concerned about failed convictions, following a spate of collapsed trials when evidence uncovered from phones has not been properly shared with the defence. This move, presumably, is to emphasise the importance of early disclosure of evidence.

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Why are we playing games with our privacy?

By Peter Franklin

Now the police are responding to protests from victim support organisations by offering to meet stakeholders to discuss the new consent forms. In a letter designed to reassure them, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) explains:

“When a crime is investigated, police will regularly seize devices of those accused. This is done using police powers and suspects are not required to consent. Coercive police powers are clearly not appropriate for use against complainants and access to their devices should be on the basis of specific, free and informed consent.” 

This does not reassure me, or quiet my alarm bells.

It only serves to confirm my fears that it’s not only victims who should be concerned about police taking powers to download information from our mobile phones in bulk. The truth is that any of us could find ourselves in a situation where the intimate details of our life are uploaded to a police computer. Any of us could be accused of a crime, or simply witness one. All of us should be asking – what are my rights in such a situation?

Just over a year ago, Privacy International – a charity that advocates for strong privacy protections in law and technology – released a report called “Digital Stop and Search; how the police can secretly download everything from your mobile phone”. After months of dogged investigations using the Freedom of Information Act they concluded that “in the UK, police are using highly intrusive technology to extract and store data from individual’s phones, on a questionable legal basis”.

It transpires that the police have been acquiring highly personal information this way for the past ten years. Some forces have downloaded data from tens of thousands of mobile phones – and with no real legal basis for doing so.

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By Sam Leith

The systems used – often “highly intrusive technology”– varies between forces, and not all have used it. But those that did were able to download far more information than even the phone’s owner could access. Deleted and hidden data – location, health, passwords – could be extracted. The contents of WhatsApp messages, which you might assume are private because they are encrypted, have been extracted and used in court. Then there’s all the easily accessible stuff – calendar, contacts, text messages, photographs – right there in the palm of the police officer’s hand. They could find out far more about you from the phone than they ever could from searching your house.

Unlike a physical search of your house, though, these data extraction procedures were carried out without a warrant and without a clearly defined legal framework. Any legal justifications that were offered by those forces that responded to Privacy International’s enquiries were often vague. Their defence relied heavily on PACE, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, which Privacy International (PI) describes as “a piece of legislation written long before a phone became a device that could be used as a pocket surveillance tool”.

Following the publication of their report, Privacy International made a number of recommendations: guidance should be issued to the public about their rights; a warrant should be obtained before forensically examining anybody’s smartphone; and there should be independent oversight. They also invoked the principles of necessity and proportionality – and called on the Home Office to launch an independent review.

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By Eliza Filby

In Scotland, the report – combined with further investigations by The Sunday Herald – prompted parliamentary scrutiny. It’s the first time parliamentarians anywhere in the UK have called police to account in relation to key issues around data extraction technology. And as a result, Police Scotland, had to put their “cyber kiosk” roll out on hold.

The technology, which allows officers to circumvent passwords or other security measures to access data stored on mobile devices, was being used, according to the sub-committee on policing, by frontline officers “without any human rights, equality or community impact assessments, data protection or security assessments, and in the absence of any public information campaign”. No oversight. No recourse. No boundaries.

Following the publication of the PI report, the Information Commissioner’s Office is now conducting an investigation into “use of data extraction technology on the mobile phones of suspects, victims and witnesses”.

But rather than wait for the results of this enquiry, police went ahead with their consent form, asking victims to consent to a violation of their privacy and human rights or have their case dropped.

Perhaps they are hoping to address both the failures of the disclosure system and the absence of a formal basis for extracting mobile phone data with one form. If so, they’re misguided on both counts.

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How technology sidelines the citizen

By Carl Miller

Lack of data has not the been the problem behind those recent collapsed cases when the disclosure system failed.

One such high-profile rape case was dismissed, for example, after messages between the alleged victim and her friends were found to include positive references to the accused, Liam Allan, and to their ongoing relationship. Mr Allan had been under investigation for nearly two years and the police had gone through the accuser’s mobile phone data – including 57,000 text messages.

The data was in police files, but the human being responsible for going through it failed to find the key material. Since nothing of note was found, they refused requests to hand over the material to the defence, deeming it “not relevant”. The court case collapsed after three days after the data was finally handed over to the defence lawyers and messages from the victim asking for “casual sex” were found.

There’s no use having the information if you don’t know what you’re looking for – the data might as well be a ton of cuneiform tablets. The police don’t necessarily have the capacity or wherewithal to deal with it, and that’s why the disclosure system is flawed – not because they didn’t get their hands on it earlier.

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Prepare to be microchipped

By Peter Franklin

Furthermore, a consent form, signed under pressure, gives us no protection fromunre unregulated data extraction. And this applies to anyone – not only victims. We should all be be insisting on robust regulation and oversight of the “digital strip search”, because this potentially affects anybody who owns a mobile phone.

Naturally, we’re concerned about those companies who want to profile and target us, in order to sell us stuff. But news that being accused of a crime, witnessing a crime, or even being the victim of a crime – or even having been in touch with any of those people – could remove our fundamental right to privacy in the eyes of the law should worry us much more.

Police forces are currently under no obligation to tell people their rights, to inform them of what kind of information will be obtained, or to give them an inventory of what has been downloaded. There are also no limits on how long they can retain the data.

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If you want to get ahead, take a risk

By Timandra Harkness

Data from your mobile telephone has power. It could convict a criminal or exonerate an innocent person, whether you are the accuser, the accused, or a witness. Just as the home of a suspect can yield useful evidence, so too can an electronic device.

So while it may be proportionate and necessary to search such devices to solve or prevent crime, before investigators are allowed to enter our digital spaces, we should expect the same protections we are afforded when they search our homes.

Those legal protections not only guard us against incidental misuse of our data, such as security breaches or miscarriages of justice. They also draw a line around our basic right to privacy from the state.

Only a totalitarian regime should require every citizen to be transparent in the eyes of the law, simply to ease police investigations. The presumption of privacy should be the one to which police have to seek exceptions. Like the presumption of innocence in a defendant, it is a universal right because none of us knows when we might be the one to need it.

In December, the National Crime Agency froze a bank account linked to a scheme that laundered billions of pounds out of Azerbaijan, an ex-Soviet republic, having already made the UK property of an Azeri banker’s wife the target of its first ever Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO). That same month, a solicitor was fined £45,000 for trying to help the daughters of Azerbaijan’s president buy luxury property in London, and failing to do the appropriate checks on the origin of their wealth.

By the low standards of law enforcement in the UK, where allegations of laundering the proceeds of grand corruption tend to be greeted with something between a shrug and a grin, this is big. Rumours are rife that other wealthy Azeris are being considered for UWOs of their own, up to and including members of the ruling Aliyev family. If these three steps become the start of a journey into the heart of all Azeri-owned wealth in the UK, it could prove uncomfortable, and not just for lawyers and estate agents.

London and Baku have a close relationship thanks to BP, which opened an office in Azerbaijan within six months of its independence from the Soviet Union. The oil revenue has gradually allowed the Aliyev family – first Heydar, the former head of Azerbaijan’s KGB, and then, following his death in 2003, his son Ilham – to turn the country into a hereditary kleptocracy. Heydar is commemorated by a vast swooping museum in central Baku, designed by Zaha Hadid and set among magnificent fountains. This glorious building houses various bits of ephemera from his life – a train ticket, a school report from the KGB academy, various of his limousines – like the grave goods of a pharaoh.

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By Oliver Bullough

Under the rule of the Aliyevs, their friends and relations have become enormously wealthy, and used the global banking system to launder much of their money into the West (as revealed by the “Azerbaijani Laundromat” leak of financial documents). “Azerbaijan’s economy is largely dominated by monopolistic interests,” wrote the US embassy in a 2010 cable released by wikileaks. The cable was part of a series in which American diplomats explained to Washington which families were most powerful in Azerbaijan, and they provide a fascinating insight into a system where bribes, influence, and abuse of power control everything.

This particular cable dealt with the business activities of Emergencies Minister Kamaladdin Heydarov (of “the second most powerful commercial family in Azerbaijan”, according to the State Department officials). The kind of behaviour described in the cable was beginning to get Azerbaijan a bad reputation and it was to improve the country’s image that, in 2008, Heydarov’s two sons Nijat and Tale created a London-based lobby group: The European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS).

TEAS specialised in promoting Azerbaijan, and acted as secretary for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the country. It flew MPs out to Baku, where it showed them around, and tried to persuade them that the country was a reliable source of energy, the wronged party in its long-running dispute with Armenia, and a generally lovely place for all its citizens.  “Such visits have great effectiveness, because to read about Azerbaijan is one thing, witnessing the development of the country is another thing,” Tale Heydarov boasted at a lobbying conference in Baku in March 2012.

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By Felix Light

Jim Sheridan, then the Labour MP for Paisley, accepted a three-day £3,100 trip to Azerbaijan in March 2013, and came back full of praise. “We discovered that the trade unions there enjoyed better relationships and more employment rights than we do here in the UK. Azerbaijan is a young democracy and we are the oldest, yet we are still fighting for employment rights,” he told the House of Commons later that year. (The International Trade Union Confederation is less sanguine, saying that in Azerbaijan many labour rights exist only on paper.)

Over on the Government benches, Mark Field, Tory MP for Westminster and recipient of a five-day £3,500 trip in May 2011, told the Commons in the month after he got back that Azerbaijan “has made tremendous strides forward both politically and economically in recent years. That should be recognised and rewarded.” At the time he was on TEAS’ payroll, as a member of its advisory board.

I asked Heydarov about the source of TEAS’ funding, when I met him on the sidelines of a business forum that TEAS organised in Mayfair. He said the money came from members’ subscriptions, but refused to be drawn on their identities or the amount they contributed. These members have certainly been very generous, whoever they are. TEAS and other Azeri lobbying groups spent more than £70,000 on MPs alone. Most of it went on 23 trips to Azerbaijan, although Slough’s Labour MP Fiona McTaggart received £1,000 of hospitality in Britain, at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, and TEAS even got into publishing.

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Why are publishers pandering to the mob?

By Sam Leith

When Liam Fox wrote a meditation on globalisation called Rising Tides it failed to trouble either the charts or the reviewers on either side of the Atlantic (sales figures show it has sold just over 3,000 copies in English worldwide), but TEAS bought the Azeri translation rights for an astonishing £11,400, paid in two instalments in 2014, and then flew him to Istanbul to promote it at the cost of another £3,579.94.

One book industry source described this as barely believable: “Azeri rights for something like Malala, or Michelle Obama, or Dan Brown might go for £11,000, but it would need to be a big name. This does not look like a wise investment”.

Of course, the nature of an investment depends on the return you are looking for. If TEAS was seeking friends, rather than profits, perhaps the investment was a wise one, particularly since Fox has risen to be the minister in charge of negotiating our post-Brexit trade deals.

“MPs have a history of accepting funding from Azerbaijan’s lobbyists and keeping quiet about gross and systemic human rights violations, including some now in senior governmental positions,” said Rebecca Vincent, a former US diplomat in Baku and now head of the UK Bureau of Reporters without Borders.

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She was particularly critical about the fact that so few British politicians had supported journalists who have revealed the extent of the wealth of Azerbaijan’s ruling family, and been harassed or jailed as a result. “As the source of the largest foreign direct investment in Azerbaijan, the UK has a responsibility to speak out. As long as our politicians turn a blind eye to this repression, courageous individuals like Mehman Huseynov and Khadija Ismayilova will continue to pay the price.”

This is not to say that TEAS was an organisation packed with ruthless and sinister geniuses, since it was at times almost hilariously incompetent. In 2010, it hired the 1980s two–hit-wonder Smiley Culture to produce propaganda music in the mistaken belief he could persuade Lady Gaga to do the singing, which he could not. This and other pratfalls notwithstanding, the budding scandal over Azeri money in London does raise questions over whether MPs should have been quite so willing to accept the organisation’s money.

Goran Lindblad, a Swedish ex-MEP who worked for TEAS in Brussels, told me his pay cheques came from a Marshall Islands company via Danske Bank’s branch in Tallinn, the same branch that is now at the centre of perhaps the biggest money laundering scandal of all time: the movement of €200 billion through non-resident accounts in 2007-15.

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By Brett Christophers

We have become accustomed to hearing stories of kleptocratic cash pouring into UK property, which is what the NCA is (belatedly) beginning to investigate, but perhaps the scandal will turn out to be not how much dirty cash was spent in Knightsbridge, but how much ended up in Westminster. Because Azerbaijan is not the only country that has sought to buy friends in this way.

Ukrainian oligarch Dymtro Firtash ran a similar lobbying group, as did the Bahraini ruling family. Bashar al-Assad’s father-in-law ran the British Syrian Society, which took MPs to Damascus. Even the Russians tried to get into the game, with a group called the Conservative Friends of Russia, though Kremlin money eventually proved too hot even for our MPs to handle.

There are many urgent issues being ignored by politicians thanks to the Brexit gridlock, but perhaps this is the most important: who exactly has been paying their wages? In a democracy, voters have to know who their elected representatives are working for. Once trust in their integrity has been lost, it will be all but impossible to restore.

But what if there were a shorter route? One could be created by building a canal across Thailand’s Kra Isthmus. This wouldn’t be as big a shortcut as the Suez or Panama canals, but the savings would still be considerable – reducing the trans-oceanic journey by 1,200 kilometres. Vast sums in fuel costs could saved on every trip – hundreds of thousands of dollars for the biggest vessels.

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Trump's protectionist swagger is no match for China's financial muscle

By Liam Halligan

Of course, the civil engineering challenges would be daunting – not to mention the financial, environmental and political obstacles. However, this is just sort of game-changing investment that China’s Belt and Road initiative is designed to take on.

In a piece for Foreign Policy, Bruno Maçães speculates as to what else the initiative might have achieved by by 2049 (the hundredth anniversary of People’s Republic):

“A bridge crossing the Caspian Sea—125 miles, from Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan—has made road transport between Europe and China fast and easy, changing old mental maps that separated continents… In Africa a high-speed railway connects the two coasts, traversing Djibouti, Ethiopia, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Cameroon in under twenty hours. Trade between Africa, Asia, and South America increasingly uses this route.”

Even if the Belt and Road ends up skipping the very most ambitious challenges, it will lay down a new global infrastructure whose impact will go well beyond commerce alone.

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Forget the free-trade agreements – here's how Brexit Britain can work with China

By Bruno Maçães

When European explorers, starting with the Portuguese, established global trade routes from the 15th century onwards, they didn’t just move cargo around the world – they mobilised money, power and culture. Furthermore, because they controlled the routes, they controlled the terms of exchange (in their own favour, of course).

Trade, as much as the military might that followed in its wake, was instrumental the global triumph of the West. It would therefore be naive not to see the historical significance of what China is building beyond its borders today.

It’s certainly not lost on Bruno Maçães, though he’s not predicting the total eclipse of the West:

“The West will diminish in reach and influence, but 30 years from now it will continue to offer a powerful alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative, even if it may also be expected to evolve in response to the Chinese challenge.

“The problem for now is to determine the core of the new Chinese world picture and identify the main traits which it will come to impress upon the whole. The Belt and Road Initiative may never become universal—just as the West never became universal—but in some areas it will rule unimpeded, and different shades of influence will be felt everywhere.”

So, what he calls “the new Chinese world order” will coexist with the western world order – both competing and cooperating with it, but most crucially providing a distinct alternative.

Some of the differences are obvious – not least in respect to democracy and human rights. Others may be less apparent to us, but are also of great importance. In many ways Chinese society is more dynamic that our own, for instance with respect to technology:

“The Chinese made 50 times more mobile payments in 2016 than U.S. consumers did, tripling to $5.5 trillion in China while U.S. payments only grew 39 percent, to $112 billion. China’s order will be one of fast economic and social change, much more at ease with its costs than Western societies at present. Visions of the future will be its main currency and symbols of distinction.”

Fifty times more mobile payments – that’s an astounding gap. But it’s not just the extent of digitisation that separates China from the West, but the framework of values within which it’s taking place. Maçães points out that the Chinese model of governance rejects the “Enlightenment ideals of transparency and public knowledge.” Everything that we fear about the control of big tech over our data, our privacy and our lives, also applies in China, but to the nth degree – and not just China, but everywhere that the Chinese way of doing things is likely to prevail.

Suggested reading

China: not just an economic superpower

By Peter Franklin

He argues that the West will have to “evolve in response to the Chinese challenge”, but how? Beyond the bits of government that specialise in such things, and the western businesses and the occasional NGO with a direct interest – who is engaging with these great matters?

Not public opinion, that’s for sure. Compare the high profile reaction to the Trump travel ban with the response to the Chinese government’s repression of the Muslim Uighur minority. One can condemn Trump’s actions and language, but why does the mass internment and ‘re-education’ of perhaps one million Chinese Muslims excite so little attention?

Western progressives are almost exclusively focused on abuses of power perpetrated within, and by, the West; and, in their minds, that can be justified on the assumption that, whatever happens elsewhere in the world, it is the West that is the ultimate driver of global change.

But if that were ever true, it isn’t anymore.

It has to be said at once that the case was lost on a technicality. The judge ruled that outlawing FGM is a matter for individual states, arguing that Congress did not have the authority to pass a 1996 law that prohibited it across the board. The judgment is likely to be appealed but one of its disastrous effects is to make further prosecutions of FGM practitioners extremely difficult at a time when it’s believed that the practice is becoming more widespread. Immigration from countries where FGM is common means that more than half a million women and girls in the US are believed to be at risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

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Why are so many left-wing progressives silent about Islam's totalitarian tendencies?

By Julie Bindel

Ominously, the failed prosecution has energised defenders of FGM, who claimed in court and TV interviews that all that was done to nine child victims was “female circumcision” or a “ritual nick”. The medic who carried out the procedure, Dr Jumana Nagarwala, belongs to a small Shia Muslim sect, the Dawoodi Bohra, some of whose members have their daughters cut in defiance of the longstanding (and previously unchallenged) federal ban in the US. Her lawyer claimed that she had merely carried out a protected religious procedure that didn’t involve removing the clitoris or labia, unlike the most extreme form of FGM.

In reality, FGM is much more a cultural than a religious practice, originating in Africa where it is still carried out in many countries. And while it is bad enough to hear people defending any species of unnecessary surgical procedure on girls’ bodies, doctors who examined the child victims found plenty of evidence of harm; they discovered scar tissue and lacerations to the girls’ genitalia, while one victim said she was in so much pain she could hardly walk.

Some of the girls cried and screamed during the procedure and one was given Valium ground into liquid Tylenol to keep her calm, according to court records. Two of the victims were just seven years old when Dr Nagarwala performed these procedures on them, using a private clinic in Detroit owned by another doctor who also faced charges.

FGM is controversial even among members of this sect, which originated in western India, and some actively oppose it. They are worried by the outcome of the Detroit trial, believing that it sends a dangerous message to countries where huge numbers of girls are still being mutilated. “Unfortunately this is going to embolden those who believe that this must be continued… they’ll feel that this is permission, that it’s OK to do this,” said Mariya Taher, who was herself a child victim of the same type of FGM.

In western and developing countries alike, some of the most effective campaigners against FGM come from communities where it is still practised, often women who were forced to undergo the procedure themselves when they were children. Many of them are justifiably angry about something that was done to them without their consent, with potentially catastrophic consequences for their sex lives and ability to give birth safely. In some good news, the British government has committed to spend £50 million on grassroots programmes to stop FGM across Africa by 2030.

Further reading

Why we must not tolerate intolerance

By Benedict Rogers

Yet if the failed prosecution has achieved nothing else, it has at least focused public attention on a practice that happens in conditions of great secrecy in western countries and is notoriously difficult to prosecute. In the UK, where an estimated 137,000 women and girls have been subjected to FGM, there has not yet been a single successful prosecution.

The police say it is carried out behind closed doors, with parents and practitioners taking care to leave no evidential trail, and children are often too frightened to testify at trials that might send their mother or father to prison for up to seven years. But mandatory reporting by health professionals is gradually uncovering the extent of the practice in the UK, with more than 6,000 cases being recorded by midwives and obstetricians between April 2017 and March 2018. These are adult women who may have been cut abroad, when they were children, although it may be an indicator that their own female children are at risk of FGM in this country.

More than 200 million girls and women have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, according to the World Health Organisation. In countries such as Sierra Leone, where FGM is still legal, almost 90% of the female population aged between 15 and 49 has been cut, causing a huge range of health problems and high rates of maternal mortality.

Cultural pressure is relentless and hard to resist, according to a recent report by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which noted that girls in Sierra Leone who try to avoid FGM are accused of being unclean, promiscuous or carrying disease. Even in countries such as Egypt, where FGM was outlawed in 2008, the practice continues and is often carried out in insanitary conditions by older women with no medical knowledge. There have been horrific cases of girls and even babies bleeding to death after being cut with knives or razor blades.

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By Julie Bindel

Changing the law is an essential step in protecting women and girls but changing ideas is just as important. It is a shocking fact that some western liberals used to defend FGM as ‘part of their culture’ without looking too closely at who ‘they’ were – namely the cutters who made money from it, and the men who wanted ‘pure’ wives who found sex too painful to have extra-marital relationships.

It is only two decades since the feminist writer Germaine Greer argued in one of her books, the whole woman, that banning FGM was “an attack on cultural identity”, rightly drawing a rebuke from MPs on the international development select committee. In an unintentional illustration of how important language is in these matters, Greer also made the wildly insensitive observation that “one man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation”. She has long been regarded as a maverick but it is worth remembering that cultural relativism, while widely and rightly discredited, has never completely gone away.

That is why the outcome of the American court case has the potential to be so damaging. The judge was clear that his decision didn’t amount to an endorsement of FGM but that won’t be the headline in parts of Africa and Asia where generations of cutters are determined to keep the practice going. Hearing it sanitised as just a ‘nick’ in an American courtroom is deeply alarming, and needs to be challenged in every available forum.

FGM is misogyny in its bleakest form, denying girls control of their own bodies and threatening their lives in the most extreme cases. It is a gross abuse of human rights, wherever it happens, and western countries have a duty to make sure that both their laws and language lead by example.

Such a scenario would provoke an outcry from the international community and human rights organisations would launch an immediate inquiry. Yet this is exactly what is happening now in the UK, and leading human rights organisations, like Liberty who claim to “hold the powerful to account”, are suspiciously silent.

The threat to the rights of women comes from a proposed amendment to the Gender Recognition Act (2004).  Championed by Conservative MP Maria Miller, the suggestion is to ‘streamline’ the process by which someone changes their legal gender by removing the need for a medical diagnosis and reducing the length of time an applicant needs to live in their “acquired gender”.  On the surface this sounds reasonable, but the implications for women and girls are grave. In effect, a declaration of feelings of “feminine gender identity” would be all that is required for male-bodied people to access women-only services.

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By Josephine Bartosch

At present, unprecedented numbers of male-bodied prisoners are identifying as transwomen and demanding access to the female estate. Making the process of changing legal gender easier will exacerbate this problem, the burden of which is already falling on some of the most vulnerable women, those in prison. Human rights organisations such as Liberty refuse to see transgender people as anything other than vulnerable and marginalised, “forced to grow up in a society that discriminates against them, treats their identity as an illness, and fails to recognise their true selves”. We are living at a time when the use of stickers bearing the words ‘women do not have penises’ is being investigated as a hate crime. The reticence of groups to speak out is understandable, but ultimately unforgivable.

Since the proposal to amend the Gender Recognition Act was announced, grassroots feminist discussion groups have sprung-up across the UK, with talks organised by We Need to Talk, Woman’s Place UK and Let a Woman Speak. Earlier this year I spoke at one of these talks – after sustained pressure from transgender activists the original venue had to cancel the booking at less than 24-hours notice, and the organisers were left scrambling to find a new venue. In June, the same group were the subject of a bomb threat. Just last week, in Plymouth, a listed building that had hosted a similar discussion was covered in graffiti and posters by those opposed to women’s free speech. The event organisers are now trying to raise money to cover the cost of the clean-up. These are not isolated incidents, they are part of a concerted campaign of intimidation designed to stop women from meeting to discuss their rights.

Suggested reading

Who let the thought police invade our universities?

By Julie Bindel

Women who persist, those who deviate from the mantra ‘transwomen are women’, are smeared as TERFs (an acronym for ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’) and frequently reported to their employers, political parties and even religious leaders. Self-appointed social justice warriors online lurk in discussion groups to report women for ‘transphobia’. Hashtags such as #punchaterf and #fuckterfs are used to incite hatred and violence against those who question the validity of gender identity.

Freedom of assembly is fundamental to a functioning democracy. And yet, from the heart of the establishment to the lunatic fringe of masked extremists, there is no question that women are being intimidated by constant efforts to stop discussion of the Gender Recognition Act. Whether one agrees or not, demands to shut down debate and the dehumanisation of those with unpopular beliefs should ring alarm bells.

Given the violence, actual and threatened, and the sustained harassment of women who persist in thinking biological sex is important in a sexist society, it is not unreasonable to ask what human rights organisations are doing to protect the freedom of assembly here in the UK. Liberty boasts a laudable aim “to protect basic rights and freedoms through the courts, in Parliament and in the wider community” so one wonders: where is their statement in defence of women meeting to discuss their rights?

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By Owl Fisher

In a joint statement, Liberty, the British Institute of Human Rights and Amnesty International announced their support for Maria Miller’s proposals, arguing the “announcement is long overdue as transphobia, disinformation and prejudice have been spread by a small number of people opposing equality for trans people”. Human rights organisations have stopped listening to those they ought to represent and have instead become lumbering corporate beasts chasing an ever narrowing definition of ‘inclusive’ – one that excludes feminist women. 

It should be a source of shame that this battle has been left to largely unfunded groups of women. Elected officials and esteemed human rights organisations charged with defending our freedoms have either ignored the controversy or actively colluded in the silencing and shaming of feminists. Today’s smug declarations about the ‘right side of history’ will do nothing to protect the next generation of women and girls whose rights are at risk of being virtue-signalled away. I wonder, in five years time if I’m on trial for hate speech for having written this article, whose side will Liberty be on?

Following this sort of reasoning, the Shadow Attorney General and former Liberty director, Shami Chakrabarti, argued on the BBC’s Today programme this week that the right to an abortion should be imposed by law upon Northern Ireland – even if the majority of its citizens do not want it. The right to an abortion is a fundamental human right and thus it even supersedes the wishes of the majority – that was basically her line, I believe, though she was careful not to spell it out quite so baldly.

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By Ruth Dudley Edwards

This is not a discussion on abortion, my interest is simply in the way the appeal to human rights can be used to trump the wishes of the majority. And I worry that what was originally intended as a protection against the tyranny of the majority can be used as a means of imposing or maintaining the dominance of a certain worldview, even against the wishes of the population concerned. That is, it becomes a way of imposing a particular slate of (typically liberal) values without the need to persuade people to vote for them.

Writing in the Human Rights Law Journal in 2016, Hurst Hammun, Professor of International Law at Tuft University, offered the following warning:

“Unless there is a conscious attempt to return to the principles of consensus and universality, the increasingly strident calls from European and other ‘Western’ human rights activists for adherence to the contemporary liberal European construct of society is likely to create a backlash in the rest of the world. This tendency is concurrently exacerbated by activists who see an expansive concept of ‘rights’ as the primary means to effect domestic social and political change.”

Imagine, for instance, that the language of human rights has been extended to the unborn child, as some argue it should be, and used as a means of nullifying the wishes of the majority of voters in the recent Ireland referendum. There would rightly have been a massive outcry. So why does the Shadow Attorney General think it acceptable in the case of Northern Ireland? Because, of course, she believes that human rights, when properly understood, map onto her own political values, and are a means of achieving them.

Perhaps I should come clean about my wider nervousness about the very notion of human rights. Much that has been achieved by an appeal to human rights has been laudable. But I remain cautious about the inherent individualism of human rights, that a right is regarded as the property of individual human beings and as the foundational basis for this whole moral philosophy. Cautious because, for most of human history, ethical consciousness has been structured around a sense of corporate responsibility – of the ‘we’ coming before the ‘I’.

But in the ideology of human rights, the rest of the world and all other people are regarded as satellites to the solitary individual who is demanding their ‘rights’ as a form of moral self-assertion. And as self-assertion knows no limits, so the sense of what rights one is entitled to inevitably grows and grows. This is the mission creep of human rights language. “The defence of human rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenceless,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And that was way back in 1978. Since then human rights have demanded ever greater jurisdiction.

Morally speaking, human rights as conceived by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are a relatively new thing. That declaration has its seventieth birthday this December. And in this country, the Human Rights Act is still a teenager. So it is still way too soon to give a full account of its successes and failures. There are those, especially in Muslim countries, who regard human rights as a means of ushering in western liberal values against the will of the majority. They argue that the expansion of human rights language has coincided historically with the liberal hegemony in the West and that it fails to respect other moral systems like Islam – or even Judaism and Christianity with their communitarian moral consciousness.

But the doctrine of human rights was substantially the creation of seventeenth century Christian political theology. It was John Locke that argued that human beings had been granted their rights by God and as protection against tyrannical government. “All men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” as the Declaration of Independence put it, drawing on Locke. And the protection of minorities – women, children, ethnic minorities, homosexuals – against the power and prejudice of the majority has been at the heart of its moral successes. But no one considered that the language of rights could itself become a form of tyranny – a means of imposing liberal values on the majority of society against their will.

The global experiment in human rights has a long way to go. There is much to applaud. But as western societies begin to whisper about the possibility of a post-liberal future, the whole basis of human rights begins to look more exposed than ever before. And without (Locke’s) God to underwrite its claims to an unbreakable connection between morality and the human individual, it becomes ever plainer that human rights only exist because we believe in them.

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By Giles Fraser

My experience helped shine a spotlight on the erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy, and on Xi Jinping’s intense repression of any and all dissent. Yet that campaign of repression takes far more serious forms for Chinese activists, in Hong Kong and the mainland, than anything I experienced. I suffered an unpleasant inconvenience, but within 24 hours I was safely home in London, able to see family and friends, and free to speak out. Those in Hong Kong and mainland China who challenge the Communist Party face a far graver fate.

In Hong Kong, in recent years, booksellers publishing exposes of Chinese leaders’ private lives or critiques of the regime have been abducted.

Pro-democracy elected legislators disqualified.

Student leaders of pro-democracy demonstrations have been jailed.

In mainland China, human rights lawyers, bloggers, religious leaders and dissidents are jailed or disappear – and are subjected to the most horrific forms of torture imaginable.

The scale of China’s brutality has been revealed in a new and unique 40-page report published last month. Unique not so much for what it documents – major international human rights organisations have been reporting China’s abuses for years. But unique in terms of who it is authored by. For the first time ever, a human rights commentary has been smuggled out of China by a human rights lawyer who is still living in China – and, furthermore, has now disappeared.

Gao Zhisheng is perhaps China’s best known human rights lawyer, and certainly one of its bravest. Known for defending Christians, Falun Gong practitioners and other vulnerable groups, Gao’s licence was revoked and his law firm closed down in 2006. He was then sentenced to three years in jail but given a five-year suspended sentence on probation, charged with incitement to subvert state power. During his probation period he was forcibly ‘disappeared’ at least six times. On one occasion he was held incommunicado and tortured for six weeks. He was then returned to prison for a further three years.

On 7 August 2014 Gao was released from prison, but in August this year he disappeared again. Somehow despite the Chinese state’s authoritarianism, he was able to compile an analysis of the regime’s human rights violations, drawing on information provided by what he calls “a petitioner in dark nights”. He covers a wide range of themes, from violations of freedom of expression and religious persecution to land rights and police brutality, and describes China as a “killing field”. China, under Xi Jinping is, he says, enduring “the harshest and most brutal political oppression since the end of Mao Zedong’s rule”.

Gao’s analysis could be criticised for hyperbole. People in North Korea or ISIS-controlled territory in Syria or Iraq, for example, may take issue with his suggestion that “the cruel reality of extreme hostility to human rights has made documenting human rights in China the most dangerous cause in the world”. Unfortunately too many places in the world could lay claim to that description. But allowances should be made for the polemical style. This is an analysis written by a man who has suffered intense physical and mental torture, separation from his family, constant surveillance and repeated arrests or disappearances, and yet still had the extraordinary courage not only to write such a comprehensive document but to find a way to get it out of the country. It deserves to be read and taken seriously.

Gao provides numerous shocking, graphic examples of police brutality:

• The wife of a church pastor buried alive by a bulldozer destroying the church building;
• The shooting of a petitioner by a police officer;
• The torture of human rights defenders;
• A pastor, Bao Guohua, has been jailed for fourteen years, and his wife for twelve years, for protesting at the destruction of church crosses in Zhejiang;
• When a political prisoner, Peng Ming, died in jail, his brain, heart and other organs were removed – to cover up the cause of death or, in the regime’s account, for “medical research”;
• One activist, Huang Yan, suffered two miscarriages as a result of being beaten up by police and she claimed that one officer “kneeled on my body, grabbed my hair and pounded my head on the ground until it was covered with blood”. Her husband was seized, forced to kneel down under the hot sun, and told to divorce her because she is “a dangerous person”. Denied medical treatment for cancer, she was then unable to walk as a result of torture. “They took all my dignity away,” she added. “The torture was indescribable. They put seven sets of chains on my hands and feet, and sent in male inmates to beat me.”

Another account, by a former party official Wang Qiuping, describes how “they beat up, tortured, abused, disable and deliberately harmed the bodies of people… Handcuffs, chains, helmets, masks, bullet-proof jackets, hanging and beating, pinching testicles with clips” and used other torture to extract confessions. He was knocked unconscious three times in 313 days. “To extract a confession, they wouldn’t let me sleep for 120 days”.

The case against China isn’t just anecdotal:

• China is ranked 176^th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ index of press freedom.
• It is rated “the worst abuser of internet freedom” in the world by Freedom House[1.  Freedom House reports: “China was the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom in the 2016 Freedom on the Net survey for the second consecutive year. Harsh punishments for expression and a deteriorating legal environment are significantly undermining civil society activism on the internet.” And the repression appears to be working: “Against the backdrop of stricter internet control across all platforms, digital activism has been gradually waning. While some individuals are still outspoken, observers noted a decline in the lively discussion of social causes which used to characterize popular microblogs.”].
• And the Committee to Protect Journalists records that it is the world’s second most active jailer of reporters[2. Turkey put most journalists (81) behind bars in the latest year – according to the New York-based Cttee to Protect Journalists – but China was in second place, with Egypt third.].

Gao describes how his own relatives have been hounded, their identity cards revoked. “The brutal persecution of my in-laws is just a snapshot of the … severe abuse of human dignity and basic human rights,” he says. Yet despite everything he has personally experienced, Gao himself is astonished at the scale of the brutality of Xi Jinping’s regime:

“I still can’t help but wonder when I’m documenting these human rights violations: can this be true? In today’s world and at this stage of human civilization, such a brutal and ruthless regime still exists – in China, in the 21st century.”

And he holds the international community complicit for its silence:

“The Communist Party of China has successfully terrorised and deterred the whole world with the enormous economic interests generated by the blood, sweat and labour of the poor people in China. The whole world has learned to be deaf and mute to [the] ruthless suppression of the Chinese people’s basic human rights, in exchange for the bloodstained economic interests … They allow economic interests to dictate their choices and the butchers get what they desire.”

The regime’s “dream world” is, he argues, one in which all dissent is silenced – but such a world, he adds, is “a dead world”. The regime wants a world “in which people are unanimous on everything”, because “the slightest difference looks very obvious and unpleasant to the controlling government”. But this “impulse to suppress or even eradicate such differences generates more conflicts”.

Gao’s work is a challenge to us all. It deserves to be read in the corridors of power. He has acted with extraordinary courage and is paying a very high price for his conscience. It is time for the rest of the world to rediscover its conscience, stand up to China and, at a minimum, demand Gao’s release.

Yet while my experience was unpleasant, unnecessary, unjustified and inconvenient, I was unharmed. I flew back to Bangkok, and from there back to London. I can see my family and friends again, and I can speak out freely. Chinese critics of the Communist Party face an altogether far graver threat.

Two years ago today, Gui Minhai, a bookseller and publisher in Hong Kong, disappeared while on holiday in Thailand. Gui, born in China but a Swedish citizen, ran Causeway Bay Books along with four colleagues, publishing and selling works critical of China’s Communist leaders. Gui was abducted by Chinese security agents in Thailand, and taken by force to mainland China. His four colleagues also disappeared at various moments in October 2015 – one of them, Lam Wing-kee, arrested in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, another, Lee Bo, a British national, abducted from his Hong Kong warehouse. Yet Gui’s four colleagues were all gradually released one by one in the following months. Gui, however, remains missing.

For the first three months after his disappearance, there was no trace of Gui Minhai. He, then, suddenly appeared giving a ‘confession’ on Chinese state television, claiming he had voluntarily handed himself over to the Chinese police in relation to an alleged car accident that occurred in 2003. His daughter Angela, who studies in Cambridge and has been campaigning for her father’s freedom, was able to speak to him by telephone three times in the first half of 2016, but has not heard from him for sixteen months. He has been denied access to legal counsel and Swedish consular assistance. He has not been officially charged or tried, and his whereabouts are unknown.

Two years on, it is time for the international community to ask some very serious questions of China. It is time to speak up for Gui Minhai. The Swedish government and others have been remarkably quiet, claiming to be working through diplomatic channels to assist Gui – yet after two years it is time to conclude that quiet diplomacy has not worked.

China has cleverly withheld information about why Gui is being detained, making it awkward for international human rights organisations to take up his case. Astonishingly, only PEN International, of which Gui is a member, has spoken out. That must change. This is surely a case of enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention, which requires action by the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances or the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

Angela Gui has spoken at the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, and the British Parliament, and written an op-ed for The Washington Post, but her appeals for help appear to have fallen on deaf ears. She herself has faced threats and surveillance. Yet as she says, this is not about one man alone. “This is about China actively extending its control beyond its borders,” she argues:

“This is about China kidnapping and illegally detaining more and more people because of their political beliefs. It’s about European citizens no longer being able to know that their human rights will be protected … In what has been called ‘the darkest moment’ for human rights in China in recent years we have to make sure that people like my father are not forgotten. Because to stay silent over what happened to him is to guarantee that it will happen again.”

When I was denied entry to Hong Kong, many people spoke up for me. The British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and US Congressman Chris Smith released statements. Hong Kong legislator Ray Chan courageously staged a protest in the Legislative Council, holding an enlarged photograph of me with him, taken in London two weeks earlier, and he was thrown out of the chamber for doing so. I am deeply grateful for such support, which is important, not for me personally, but for Hong Kong and the principles at stake – for this is not about me, it is about Hong Kong and its future.

But if such statements can be made in defence of a British national denied entry to Hong Kong, shouldn’t there be a far louder outcry when a Swedish national is abducted and disappeared into mainland China and held almost incommunicado for two years? When Angela asked me if I would speak at a vigil outside the Chinese embassy in London today to mark the second anniversary of her father’s abduction, I immediately agreed. I know how important solidarity is. But I asked her who else would be speaking. Her reply was heartbreaking:

“To be honest, you are the only one speaking out for my father in Britain right now”.

That must change. Join us, and ask China: Where is Gui Minhai?